d ring for the maid, and forget herself
and her waking thoughts in a new subject. After touching the bell, she
took from the table her letter to Norah and her letter to the captain,
put them both into her dressing-case with the laudanum, and locked it
securely with the key which she kept attached to her watch-chain.

Magdalen's first impression of her attendant was not an agreeable one.
She could not investigate the girl with the experienced eye of the
landlady at the London hotel, who had characterized the stranger as a
young person overtaken by misfortune, and who had showed plainly, by her
look and manner, of what nature she suspected that misfortune to be.
But with this drawback, Magdalen was perfectly competent to detect
the tokens of sickness and sorrow lurking under the surface of the new
maid's activity and politeness. She suspected the girl was ill-tempered;
she disliked her name; and she was indisposed to welcome any servant
who had been engaged by Noel Vanstone. But after the first few minutes,
"Louisa" grew on her liking. She answered all the questions put to
her with perfect directness; she appeared to understand her duties
thoroughly; and she never spoke until she was spoken to first. After
making all the inquiries that occurred to her at the time, and after
determining to give the maid a fair trial, Magdalen rose to leave the
room. The very air in it was still heavy to her with the oppression of
the past night.

"Have you anything more to say to me?" she asked, turning to the
servant, with her hand on the door.

"I beg your pardon, miss," said Louisa, very respectfully and very
quietly. "I think my master told me that the marriage was to be
to-morrow?"

Magdalen repressed the shudder that stole over her at that reference to
the marriage on the lips of a stranger, and answered in the affirmative.

"It's a very short time, miss, to prepare in. If you would be so kind as
to give me my orders about the packing before you go downstairs--?"

"There are no such preparations to make as you suppose," said Magdalen,
hastily. "The few things I have here can be all packed at once, if you
like. I shall wear the same dress to-morrow which I have on to-day.
Leave out the straw bonnet and the light shawl, and put everything else
into my boxes. I have no new dresses to pack; I have nothing ordered for
the occasion of any sort." She tried to add some commonplace phrases of
explanation, accounting as probably as might