uses for him, and laid all the blame of the dreadful
state in which I had found her entirely on herself. Was I wrong in
telling you that she had a noble nature? And won't you alter your
opinion when you read these lines?

"We had no friends to come and bid us good-by; and our few acquaintances
were too far from us--perhaps too indifferent about us--to call. We
employed the little leisure left in going over the house together for
the last time. We took leave of our old schoolroom, our bedrooms, the
room where our mother died, the little study where our father used to
settle his accounts and write his letters--feeling toward them, in our
forlorn condition, as other girls might have felt at parting with old
friends. From the house, in a gleam of fine weather, we went into the
garden, and gathered our last nosegay; with the purpose of drying the
flowers when they begin to wither, and keeping them in remembrance of
the happy days that are gone. When we had said good-by to the garden,
there was only half an hour left. We went together to the grave; we
knelt down, side by side, in silence, and kissed the sacred ground. I
thought my heart would have broken. August was the month of my mother's
birthday; and, this time last year, my father and Magdalen and I were
all consulting in secret what present we could make to surprise her with
on the birthday morning.

"If you had seen how Magdalen suffered, you would never doubt her again.
I had to take her from the last resting-place of our father and mother
almost by force. Before we were out of the churchyard she broke from
me and ran back. She dropped on her knees at the grave; tore up from it
passionately a handful of grass; and said something to herself, at the
same moment, which, though I followed her instantly, I did not get near
enough to hear. She turned on me in such a frenzied manner, when I
tried to raise her from the ground--she looked at me with such a fearful
wildness in her eyes--that I felt absolutely terrified at the sight of
her. To my relief, the paroxysm left her as suddenly as it had come. She
thrust away the tuft of grass into the bosom of her dress, and took my
arm and hurried with me out of the churchyard. I asked her why she had
gone back--I asked what those words were which she had spoken at the
grave. 'A promise to our dead father,' she answered, with a momentary
return of the wild look and the frenzied manner which had startled me
already. I was afraid to a