back a little, and mechanically dusted the parasol with
the end of her garden cloak.

"Yes!" she resumed, doggedly. "Hard on me and hard on Frank."

"Frank!" repeated Norah, advancing on her sister and turning pale as
suddenly as she had turned red. "Do you talk of yourself and Frank as
if your interests were One already? Magdalen! if I hurt _you_, do I hurt
_him_? Is he so near and so dear to you as that?"

Magdalen drew further and further back. A twig from a tree near caught
her cloak; she turned petulantly, broke it off, and threw it on the
ground. "What right have you to question me?" she broke out on a sudden.
"Whether I like Frank, or whether I don't, what interest is it of
yours?" As she said the words, she abruptly stepped forward to pass her
sister and return to the house.

Norah, turning paler and paler, barred the way to her. "If I hold you by
main force," she said, "you shall stop and hear me. I have watched
this Francis Clare; I know him better than you do. He is unworthy of a
moment's serious feeling on your part; he is unworthy of our dear, good,
kind-hearted father's interest in him. A man with any principle, any
honor, any gratitude, would not have come back as he has come back,
disgraced--yes! disgraced by his spiritless neglect of his own duty. I
watched his face while the friend who has been better than a father
to him was comforting and forgiving him with a kindness he had not
deserved: I watched his face, and I saw no shame and no distress in
it--I saw nothing but a look of thankless, heartless relief. He is
selfish, he is ungrateful, he is ungenerous--he is only twenty, and he
has the worst failings of a mean old age already. And this is the man I
find you meeting in secret--the man who has taken such a place in your
favor that you are deaf to the truth about him, even from _my_ lips!
Magdalen! this will end ill. For God's sake, think of what I have
said to you, and control yourself before it is too late!" She stopped,
vehement and breathless, and caught her sister anxiously by the hand.

Magdalen looked at her in unconcealed astonishment.

"You are so violent," she said, "and so unlike yourself, that I hardly
know you. The more patient I am, the more hard words I get for my pains.
You have taken a perverse hatred to Frank; and you are unreasonably
angry with me because I won't hate him, too. Don't, Norah! you hurt my
hand."

Norah pushed the hand from her contemptuously. "I shall never hu