“No!” said Magdalen; “you have encouraged me.”

“Encouraged you?”

“You shall see.”

With those words, she rose quietly from the sofa, and walked to the open window.  Before Norah could follow her, she had torn the Trust to pieces, and had cast the fragments into the street.

She came back to the sofa and laid her head, with a deep sigh of relief, on Norah’s bosom.  “I will owe nothing to my past life,” she said.  “I have parted with it as I have parted with those torn morsels of paper.  All the thoughts and all the hopes belonging to it are put away from me forever!”

“Magdalen, my husband will never allow you!  I will never allow you myself—­”

“Hush! hush!  What your husband thinks right, Norah, you and I will think right too.  I will take from you what I would never have taken if that letter had given it to me.  The end I dreamed of has come.  Nothing is changed but the position I once thought we might hold toward each other.  Better as it is, my love—­far, far better as it is!”

So she made the last sacrifice of the old perversity and the old pride.  So she entered on the new and nobler life.

* * * * * *

A month had passed.  The autumn sunshine was bright even in the murky streets, and the clocks in the neighborhood were just striking two, as Magdalen returned alone to the house in Aaron’s Buildings.

“Is he waiting for me?” she asked, anxiously, when the landlady let her in.

He was waiting in the front room.  Magdalen stole up the stairs and knocked at the door.  He called to her carelessly and absently to come in, plainly thinking that it was only the servant who applied for permission to enter the room.

“You hardly expected me so soon?” she said speaking on the threshold, and pausing there to enjoy his surprise as he started to his feet and looked at her.

The only traces of illness still visible in her face left a delicacy in its outline which added refinement to her beauty.  She was simply dressed in muslin.  Her plain straw bonnet had no other ornament than the white ribbon with which it was sparingly trimmed.  She had never looked lovelier in her best days than she looked now, as she advanced to the table at which he had been sitting, with a little basket of flowers that she had brought with her from the country, and offered him her hand.

He looked anxious and careworn when she saw him closer.  She interrupted his first inquiries and congratulations to ask if he had remained in London since they had parted—­if he had not even gone away, for a few days only, to see his friends in Suffolk?  No; he had been in London ever since.  He never told her that the pretty parsonage house in Suffolk wanted all those associations with herself in which the poor four walls at Aaron’s Buildings were so rich.  He only said he had been in London ever since.

“I wonder,” she asked, looking him attentively in the face, “if you are as happy to see me again as I am to see you?”