out without your
hat."

He walked on toward the cottage.

She waited a moment, and looked after him. She missed the customary
flourish of his stick; she saw his little Scotch terrier, who had run
out at his heels, barking and capering about him unnoticed. He was out
of spirits: he was strangely out of spirits. What did it mean?

CHAPTER X.

ON returning to the house, Magdalen felt her shoulder suddenly touched
from behind as she crossed the hall. She turned and confronted her
sister. Before she could ask any questions, Norah confusedly addressed
her, in these words: "I beg your pardon; I beg you to forgive me."

Magdalen looked at her sister in astonishment. All memory, on her side,
of the sharp words which had passed between them in the shrubbery was
lost in the new interests that now absorbed her; lost as completely
as if the angry interview had never taken place. "Forgive you!" she
repeated, amazedly. "What for?"

"I have heard of your new prospects," pursued Norah, speaking with a
mechanical submissiveness of manner which seemed almost ungracious; "I
wished to set things right between us; I wished to say I was sorry for
what happened. Will you forget it? Will you forget and forgive what
happened in the shrubbery?" She tried to proceed; but her
inveterate reserve--or, perhaps, her obstinate reliance on her own
opinions--silenced her at those last words. Her face clouded over on a
sudden. Before her sister could answer her, she turned away abruptly and
ran upstairs.

The door of the library opened, before Magdalen could follow her; and
Miss Garth advanced to express the sentiments proper to the occasion.

They were not the mechanically-submissive sentiments which Magdalen had
just heard. Norah had struggled against her rooted distrust of Frank, in
deference to the unanswerable decision of both her parents in his favor;
and had suppressed the open expression of her antipathy, though the
feeling itself remained unconquered. Miss Garth had made no such
concession to the master and mistress of the house. She had hitherto
held the position of a high authority on all domestic questions; and she
flatly declined to get off her pedestal in deference to any change in
the family circumstances, no matter how amazing or how unexpected that
change might be.

"Pray accept my congratulations," said Miss Garth, bristling all
over with implied objections to Frank--"my congratulations, _and_
my apologies. When I caught