fidential Moments
WHEN Maggie went up to her bedroom that night it appeared that she was not all ined to undress. She set down her dle on the first table that preseself, and began to walk up and down her room, which was a large one, with a firm, regular and rather rapid step, which showed that the exercise was the instinctive vent of stroement. Her eyes and cheeks had an almost feverish brilliancy; her head was thrown backward and her hands were clasped with the palms outward and with that tension of the arms which is apt to apaal absorption. Had anything remarkable happened?
Nothing that you are not likely to sider in the highest degree unimportant. She had been hearing some fine musig by a fine bass voice - but then it was sung in a provincial amateur fashion, such as would have left your critical ear much to desire. And she was scious of having been looked at a great deal in rather a furtive manner from beh a pair of well-marked horizontal eyebrows, with a glahat seemed somehow to have caught the vibratory influence of the voice. Such things could have had no perceptible effe a thhly well-educated young lady with a perfectly balanced mind, who had had all the advantages of forturaining and refined society. But if Maggie had been that young lady, you would probably have known nothing about her; her life would have had so few vicissitudes that it could hardly have been written; for the happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.
In pgies highly strung, hungry nature - just e away from a third rate schoolroom, with all its jarring sounds ay round of tasks - these apparently trivial causes had the effect of rousing aing her imagination in a way that was mysterious to herself. It was not that she thought distinctly of Mr Stephe or dwelt on the indications that he looked at her with admiration; it was rather that she felt the half-remote presence of a world of love ay and delight, made up of vague, mingled images from all the poetry and romance she had ever read, or had ever woven in her dreamy reveries. Her mind glanced bace or twice to the time when she had courted privation, when she had thought all longing, all impatience was subdued, but that dition seemed irrecoverably gone, and she recoiled from the remembrance of it. No prayer, no striving now would bring back that ive peace: the battle of her life, it seemed, was not to be decided in that short and easy way - by perfect renunciation at the very threshold of her youth. The music was vibrating iill - Purcells music with its wild passion and fancy - and she could not stay in the recolle of that bare lonely past. She was in her brighter a?rial world again when a little tap came at the door: of course it was her cousin, who entered in ample white dressing-gown.
`Why, Maggie, you naughty child, havent you begun to undress? said Lucy, in astonishment. `I promised not to e and talk to you, because I thought you must be tired. But here you are, looking as if you were ready to dress for a ball. e, e, get on your dressing-gown and unplait your hair.
`Well, you are not very forward, retorted Maggie, hastily reag her own pink cotton gown, and looking at Lucys light brown hair brushed ba curly disorder.
`O I have not much to do. I shall sit down and talk to you, till I see you are really on the way to bed.
While Maggie stood and unplaited her long black hair over her pink drapery, Lucy sat dowhe toilette table, watg her with affeate