“NORAH BARTRAM.”

(Added by Miss Garth.)

“MY DEAR CHILD—­If I had ever lost my old loving recollection of you, I should feel it in my heart again now, when I know that it has pleased God to restore you to us from the brink of the grave.  I add these lines to your sister’s letter because I am not sure that you are quite so fit yet, as she thinks you, to accept her proposal.  She has not said a word of her husband or herself which is not true.  But Mr. Bartram is a stranger to you; and if you think you can recover more easily and more pleasantly to yourself under the wing of your old governess than under the protection of your new brother-in-law, come to me first, and trust to my reconciling Norah to the change of plans.  I have secured the refusal of a little cottage at Shanklin, near enough to your sister to allow of your seeing each other whenever you like, and far enough away, at the same time, to secure you the privilege, when you wish it, of being alone.  Send me one line before we meet to say Yes or No, and I will write to Shanklin by the next post.

“Always yours affectionately,

“HARRIET GARTH”

The letter dropped from Magdalen’s hand.  Thoughts which had never risen in her mind yet rose in it now.

Norah, whose courage under undeserved calamity had been the courage of resignation—­Norah, who had patiently accepted her hard lot; who from first to last had meditated no vengeance and stooped to no deceit—­Norah had reached the end which all her sister’s ingenuity, all her sister’s resolution, and all her sister’s daring had failed to achieve.  Openly and honorably, with love on one side and love on the other, Norah had married the man who possessed the Combe-Raven money—­and Magdalen’s own scheme to recover it had opened the way to the event which had brought husband and wife together.

As the light of that overwhelming discovery broke on her mind, the old strife was renewed; and Good and Evil struggled once more which should win her—­but with added forces this time; with the new spirit that had been breathed into her new life; with the nobler sense that had grown with the growth of her gratitude to the man who had saved her, fighting on the better side.  All the higher impulses of her nature, which had never, from first to last, let her err with impunity—­which had tortured her, before her marriage and after it, with the remorse that no woman inherently heartless and inherently wicked can feel—­all the nobler elements in her character, gathered their forces for the crowning struggle and strengthened her to meet, with no unworthy shrinking, the revelation that had opened on her view.  Clearer and clearer, in the light of its own immortal life, the truth rose before her from the ashes of her dead passions, from the grave of her buried hopes.  When she looked at the letter again—­when she read the words once more which told her that the recovery of the lost fortune was her sister’s triumph, not hers, she had victoriously trampled down all little jealousies and all mean regrets; she could say in he r hearts of hearts, “Norah has deserved it!”