“What!  Mr. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the dramatist?”

“And manager of Drury Lane Theaytre.  Didn’t you ’ear ’im hoffer to put you on the stage, w’en ’e spoke about your looks and voice?”

Madge turned to the mirror; and saw, for the—­first time in weeks, a sudden light of hope, a sense of triumphs yet in her power, dawn upon her face.

CHAPTER XVII.

I Hear Again from Winwood.

Meanwhile we passed through a time of deep sorrow at the Faringfield house and ours.  The effect of Tom’s untimely fate, coming upon Margaret’s departure and the disclosures regarding her and Ned, was marked in Mr. Faringfield by a haggardness of countenance, an averted glance, a look of age, pitiful to see.  His lady considered herself crushed by affliction, as one upon whom grief had done its worst; and she resigned herself to the role of martyr in the comfortably miserable way that some people do, without losing her appreciation of the small consolations of life, such as morning chocolate, afternoon tea, and neighbourly conversation upon the subject of her woes.  Poor Fanny bore up for the sake of cheering her parents, but her face, for a long time, was rarely without the traces of tears shed in solitude.  Of that household of handsome, merry children, whose playful shouts had once filled the mansion and garden with life, she was now the only one left.  I sighed to think that my chances of taking her away from that house were now reduced to the infinitesimal.  Her parents, who had brought into the world so promising a family, to find themselves now so nearly alone, must not be left entirely so:  such would be her answer to any pleas I might in my selfishness offer.

What a transformation had been wrought in that once cheerful household!  How many lives were darkened!—­Mr. Faringfield’s, his wife’s, Fanny’s, Philip’s (when he should know), Madge’s (sooner or later), the sympathetic Cornelius’s, my mother’s, my own.  And what a promising, manly, gentle life had been cut short in its earliest bloom!  I knew that Tom’s life alone had been worth a score of lives like Captain Falconer’s.  And the cause of all this, though Margaret was much to blame, was the idle resolve of a frivolous lady-killer to add one more conquest to his list, in the person of a woman for whom he did not entertain more than the most superficial feelings.  What a sacrifice had been made for the transient gratification of a stranger’s vanity!  What bitter consequences, heartrending separations, had come upon all of us who had lived so close together so many pleasant years, through the careless self-amusement of a chance interloper whose very name we had not known six months before!

And now, the pleasure-seeker’s brief pastime in that quarter being ended, the lasting sorrows of his victims having begun; his own career apparently not altered from its current, their lives diverted rudely into dark channels and one of them stopped short for ever:  was the matter to rest so?