Norah was still in her own room.  She was sitting on the couch by the window, with her mother’s old music-book—­the keepsake which Mrs. Vanstone had found in her husband’s study on the day of her husband’s death—­spread open on her lap.  She looked up from it with such quiet sorrow, and pointed with such ready kindness to the vacant place at her side, that Miss Garth doubted for the moment whether Magdalen had spoken the truth.  “See,” said Norah, simply, turning to the first leaf in the music-book—­“my mother’s name written in it, and some verses to my father on the next page.  We may keep this for ourselves, if we keep nothing else.”  She put her arm round Miss Garth’s neck, and a faint tinge of color stole over her cheeks.  “I see anxious thoughts in your face,” she whispered.  “Are you anxious about me?  Are you doubting whether I have heard it?  I have heard the whole truth.  I might have felt it bitterly, later; it is too soon to feel it now.  You have seen Magdalen?  She went out to find you—­where did you leave her?”

“In the garden.  I couldn’t speak to her; I couldn’t look at her.  Magdalen has frightened me.”

Norah rose hurriedly; rose, startled and distressed by Miss Garth’s reply.

“Don’t think ill of Magdalen,” she said.  “Magdalen suffers in secret more than I do.  Try not to grieve over what you have heard about us this morning.  Does it matter who we are, or what we keep or lose?  What loss is there for us after the loss of our father and mother?  Oh, Miss Garth, there is the only bitterness!  What did we remember of them when we laid them in the grave yesterday?  Nothing but the love they gave us—­the love we must never hope for again.  What else can we remember to-day?  What change can the world, and the world’s cruel laws make in our memory of the kindest father, the kindest mother, that children ever had!” She stopped:  struggled with her rising grief; and quietly, resolutely, kept it down.  “Will you wait here,” she said, “while I go and bring Magdalen back?  Magdalen was always your favorite:  I want her to be your favorite still.”  She laid the music-book gently on Miss Garth’s lap—­and left the room.

“Magdalen was always your favorite.”

Tenderly as they had been spoken, those words fell reproachfully on Miss Garth’s ear.  For the first time in the long companionship of her pupils and herself a doubt whether she, and all those about her, had not been fatally mistaken in their relative estimate of the sisters, now forced itself on her mind.

She had studied the natures of her two pupils in the daily intimacy of twelve years.  Those natures, which she believed herself to have sounded through all their depths, had been suddenly tried in the sharp ordeal of affliction.  How had they come out from the test?  As her previous experience had prepared her to see them?  No:  in flat contradiction to it.

What did such a result as this imply?