e sea, and the face of her dead
father looked at her with the smile of happy old times. The voices
of her mother and her sister talked gently in the fragrant country
stillness, and the garden-walks at Combe-Raven opened once more on her
view. With a faint, wailing cry, she dropped into a chair; her head fell
forward on the table, and she burst passionately into tears.

Captain Wragge was on his feet in a moment. She shuddered as he came
near her, and waved him back vehemently with her hand. "Leave me!" she
said; "leave me a minute by myself!" The compliant Wragge retired to
the front room; looked out of the window; and whistled under his breath.
"The family spirit again!" he said. "Complicated by hysterics."

After waiting a minute or two he returned to make inquiries.

"Is there anything I can offer you?" he asked. "Cold water? burned
feathers? smelling salts? medical assistance? Shall I summon Mrs.
Wragge? Shall we put it off till to-morrow?"

She started up, wild and flushed, with a desperate s elf-command in her
face, with an angry resolution in her manner.

"No!" she said. "I must harden myself--and I will! Sit down again and
see me act."

"Bravo!" cried the captain. "Dash at it, my beauty--and it's done!"

She dashed at it, with a mad defiance of herself--with a raised voice,
and a glow like fever in her cheeks. All the artless, girlish charm of
the performance in happier and better days was gone. The native dramatic
capacity that was in her came, hard and bold, to the surface, stripped
of every softening allurement which had once adorned it. She would
have saddened and disappointed a man with any delicacy of feeling. She
absolutely electrified Captain Wragge. He forgot his politeness, he
forgot his long words. The essential spirit of the man's whole vagabond
life burst out of him irresistibly in his first exclamation. "Who the
devil would have thought it? She _can_ act, after all!" The instant the
words escaped his lips he recovered himself, and glided off into his
ordinary colloquial channels. Magdalen stopped him in the middle of his
first compliment. "No," she said; "I have forced the truth out of you
for once. I want no more."

"Pardon me," replied the incorrigible Wragge. "You want a little
instruction; and I am the man to give it you."

With that answer, he placed a chair for her, and proceeded to explain
himself.

She sat down in silence. A sullen indifference began to show itself in
her manner