With throbbing heart, with eager, trembling fingers, she drew her little white silk bag from her bosom and took out the banknotes to inclose them in the letter.  Her hand searched impetuously; her hand had lost its discrimination of touch.  She grasped the whole contents of the bag in one handful of papers, and drew them out violently, tearing some and disarranging the folds of others.  As she threw them down before her on the table, the first object that met her eye was her own handwriting, faded already with time.  She looked closer, and saw the words she had copied from her dead father’s letter—­saw the lawyer’s brief and terrible commentary on them confronting her at the bottom of the page: 

Mr. Vanstone’s daughters are Nobody’s Children, and the law leaves them helpless at their uncle’s mercy.

Her throbbing heart stopped; her trembling hands grew icily quiet.  All the Past rose before her in mute, overwhelming reproach.  She took up the lines which her own hand had written hardly a minute since, and looked at the ink, still wet on the letters, with a vacant incredulity.

The color that had risen on her cheeks faded from them once more.  The hard despair looked out again, cold and glittering, in her tearless eyes.  She folded the banknotes carefully, and put them back in her bag.  She pressed the copy of her father’s letter to her lips, and returned it to its place with the banknotes.  When the bag was in her bosom again, she waited a little, with her face hidden in her hands, then deliberately tore up the lines addressed to Captain Wragge.  Before the ink was dry, the letter lay in fragments on the floor.

“No!” she said, as the last morsel of the torn paper dropped from her hand.  “On the way I go there is no turning back.”

She rose composedly and left the room.  While descending the stairs, she met Mrs. Wragge coming up.  “Going out again, my dear?” asked Mrs. Wragge.  “May I go with you?”

Magdalen’s attention wandered.  Instead of answering the question, she absently answered her own thoughts.

“Thousands of women marry for money,” she said.  “Why shouldn’t I?”

The helpless perplexity of Mrs. Wragge’s face as she spoke those words roused her to a sense of present things.  “My poor dear!” she said; “I puzzle you, don’t I?  Never mind what I say—­all girls talk nonsense, and I’m no better than the rest of them.  Come!  I’ll give you a treat.  You shall enjoy yourself while the captain is away.  We will have a long drive by ourselves.  Put on your smart bonnet, and come with me to the hotel.  I’ll tell the landlady to put a nice cold dinner into a basket.  You shall have all the things you like, and I’ll wait on you.  When you are an old, old woman, you will remember me kindly, won’t you?  You will say:  ’She wasn’t a bad girl; hundreds worse than she was live and prosper, and nobody blames them.’  There! there! go and put your bonnet on.  Oh, my God, what is my heart made of!  How it lives and lives, when other girls’ hearts would have died in them long ago!”