So, without a tear on her cheeks, without a faltering tone in her voice, she repeated the lawyer’s own words, exactly as he had spoken them.  Miss Garth staggered back a step and caught at the bench to support herself.  Her head swam; she closed her eyes in a momentary faintness.  When they opened again, Magdalen’s arm was supporting her, Magdalen’s breath fanned her cheek, Magdalen’s cold lips kissed her.  She drew back from the kiss; the touch of the girl’s lips thrilled her with terror.

As soon as she could speak she put the inevitable question.  “You heard us,” she said.  “Where?”

“Under the open window.”

“All the time?”

“From beginning to end.”

She had listened—­this girl of eighteen, in the first week of her orphanage, had listened to the whole terrible revelation, word by word, as it fell from the lawyer’s lips; and had never once betrayed herself!  From first to last, the only movements which had escaped her had been movements guarded enough and slight enough to be mistaken for the passage of the summer breeze through the leaves!

“Don’t try to speak yet,” she said, in softer and gentler tones.  “Don’t look at me with those doubting eyes.  What wrong have I done?  When Mr. Pendril wished to speak to you about Norah and me, his letter gave us our choice to be present at the interview, or to keep away.  If my elder sister decided to keep away, how could I come?  How could I hear my own story except as I did?  My listening has done no harm.  It has done good—­it has saved you the distress of speaking to us.  You have suffered enough for us already; it is time we learned to suffer for ourselves.  I have learned.  And Norah is learning.”

“Norah!”

“Yes.  I have done all I could to spare you.  I have told Norah.”

She had told Norah!  Was this girl, whose courage had faced the terrible necessity from which a woman old enough to be her mother had recoiled, the girl Miss Garth had brought up? the girl whose nature she had believed to be as well known to her as her own?

“Magdalen!” she cried out, passionately, “you frighten me!”

Magdalen only sighed, and turned wearily away.

“Try not to think worse of me than I deserve,” she said.  “I can’t cry.  My heart is numbed.”

She moved away slowly over the grass.  Miss Garth watched the tall black figure gliding away alone until it was lost among the trees.  While it was in sight she could think of nothing else.  The moment it was gone, she thought of Norah.  For the first time in her experience of the sisters her heart led her instinctively to the elder of the two.