“Knowing the value of time, in this dreadful emergency, I examined her room, and (with my sister’s help) questioned the servants immediately on the news of her absence reaching me.  Her wardrobe was empty; and all her boxes but one, which she has evidently taken away with her, are empty, too.  We are of opinion that she has privately turned her dresses and jewelry into money; that she had the one trunk she took with her removed from the house yesterday; and that she left us this morning on foot.  The answers given by one of the servants are so unsatisfactory that we believe the woman has been bribed to assist her; and has managed all those arrangements for her flight which she could not have safely undertaken by herself.

“Of the immediate object with which she has left us, I entertain no doubt.

“I have reasons (which I can tell you at a fitter time) for feeling assured that she has gone away with the intention of trying her fortune on the stage.  She has in her possession the card of an actor by profession, who superintended an amateur theatrical performance at Clifton, in which she took part; and to him she has gone to help her.  I saw the card at the time, and I know the actor’s name to be Huxtable.  The address I cannot call to mind quite so correctly; but I am almost sure it was at some theatrical place in Bow Street, Covent Garden.  Let me entreat you not to lose a moment in sending to make the necessary inquiries; the first trace of her will, I firmly believe, be found at that address.

“If we had nothing worse to dread than her attempting to go on the stage, I should not feel the distress and dismay which now overpower me.  Hundreds of other girls have acted as recklessly as she has acted, and have not ended ill after all.  But my fears for Magdalen do not begin and end with the risk she is running at present.

“There has been something weighing on her mind ever since we left Combe-Raven—­weighing far more heavily for the last six weeks than at first.  Until the period when Francis Clare left England, I am persuaded she was secretly sustained by the hope that he would contrive to see her again.  From the day when she knew that the measures you had taken for preventing this had succeeded; from the day when she was assured that the ship had really taken him away, nothing has roused, nothing has interested her.  She has given herself up, more and more hopelessly, to her own brooding thoughts; thoughts which I believe first entered her mind on the day when the utter ruin of the prospects on which her marriage depended was made known to her.  She has formed some desperate project of contesting the possession of her father’s fortune with Michael Vanstone; and the stage career which she has gone away to try is nothing more than a means of freeing herself from all home dependence, and of enabling her to run what mad risks she pleases, in perfect security from all home control.  What it costs me to write of her in these terms, I must leave you to imagine.  The time has gone by when any consideration of distress to my own feelings can weigh with me.  Whatever I can say which will open your eyes to the real danger, and strengthen your conviction of the instant necessity of averting it, I say in despite of myself, without hesitation and without reserve.