Was this little note a severance of her present from her old life?  I do not suppose she regarded it so.  If she had fully realized that it was a step in that direction, would she have penned it with so little regret as she felt?  Or did she think that circumstances and not her own choice were responsible for her state of feeling?  She was mortified, as has been said, but she wrote with more indignation than pain.

A year ago Carmen would have been the last person to whom Margaret would have spoken about a family affair of this kind.  Nor would she have done so now, notwithstanding the intimacy established at Newport, if Carmen had not happened in that day, when Margaret was still hurt and excited, and skillfully and most sympathetically extracted from her the cause of the mood she found her in.  But even with all these allowances, that Margaret should confide such a matter to Carmen was the most startling sign of the change that had taken place in her.

“Well,” said this wise person, after she had wormed out the whole story, and expressed her profound sympathy, and then fallen into an attitude of deep reflection—­“well, I wish I could cast my bread upon the waters in that way.  What are you going to do with the money?”

“I’ve sent it to the hospital.”

“What extravagance!  And did you tell your aunt that?”

“Of course not.”

“Why not?  I couldn’t have resisted such a righteous chance of making her feel bad.”

“But I don’t want to make her feel bad.”

“Just a little?  You will never convince people that you are unworldly this way.  Even Uncle Jerry wouldn’t do that.”

“You and Uncle Jerry are very much alike,” cried Margaret, laughing in spite of herself—­“both of you as bad as you can be.”

“But, dear, we don’t pretend, do we?” asked Carmen, innocently.

To some of us at Brandon, Margaret’s letter was scarcely a surprise, though it emphasized a divergence we had been conscious of.  But with Miss Forsythe it was far otherwise.  The coolness of Margaret’s tone filled her with alarm; it was the premonition of a future which she did not dare to face.

There was a passage in the letter which she did not show; not that it was unfeeling, she told my wife afterwards, but that it exhibited a worldly-mindedness that she could not have conceived of in Margaret.  She could bear separation from the girl on whom she had bestowed her tenderest affection, that she had schooled herself to expect upon her marriage—­that, indeed, was only a part of her life of willing self-sacrifice—­their paths must lie apart, and she could hope to see little of her.  But what she could not bear was the separation in spirit, the wrenching apart of sympathy, the loss of her heart, and the thought of her going farther and farther away into that world whose cynical and materialistic view of life made her shudder.  I think there are few tragedies in life comparable to