THE ARGOSY.

JUNE, 1891.

THE FATE OF THE HARA DIAMOND.

CHAPTER XXII.

Mr. Madgin at the Helm.

Mr. Madgin’s house stood somewhat back from the main street of Eastbury.  It was an old-fashioned house, of modest exterior, and had an air of being elbowed into the background by the smarter and more modern domiciles on each side of it.  Its steep, overhanging roof and porched doorway gave it a sleepy, reposeful look, as though it were watching the on-goings of the little town through half-closed lids, and taking small cognizance thereof.

Entering from the street through a little wooden gateway of a bright green colour, a narrow pathway, paved with round pebbles that were very trying to people with tender feet, conducted you to the front door, on which shone a brass plate of surpassing brightness, whereon was inscribed:—­

___________________________________
|                                 |
|  Mr. Solomon Madgin.            |
|       General Agent,          |
|              Valuer, &c.      |
|_________________________________|

The house was a double-fronted one.  On one side of the passage as you went in was the office; on the other side was the family sitting-room.  Not that Mr. Madgin’s family was a large one.  It consisted merely of himself, his daughter Mirpah, and one strong servant-girl with an unlimited capacity for hard work.  Mirpah Madgin deserves some notice at our hands.

She was a tall, superb-looking young woman of two-and-twenty, and bore not the slightest resemblance in person, whatever she might do in mind or disposition, to that sly old fox her father.  Mirpah’s mother had been of Jewish extraction, and in Mirpah’s face you read the unmistakable signs of that grand style of beauty which is everywhere associated with the downtrodden race.  She moved about the little house in her inexpensive prints and muslins like a discrowned queen.  That she had reached the age of two-and-twenty without having been in love was no source of surprise to those who knew her; for Mirpah Madgin hardly looked like a girl who would marry a poor clerk or a petty tradesman, or who could ever sink into the commonplace drudge of a hand-to-mouth household.  She looked like a girl who would some day be claimed by a veritable hero of romance—­by some Ivanhoe of modern life, well endowed with this world’s goods—­who would wed her, and ride away with her to the fairy realms of Tyburnia and Rotten Row.