"I feel as though I were getting beyond surprises too," replied Margie; "for, from the greatest distress, I seem to have jumped into happiness, though quite how and why, I don't think I can explain even to myself."
Clara only smiled, however, for what Margie could not explain was plain enough to her.
[CHAPTER VII.]
PENITENCE AND PEACE.
SOON after Mabel Raye went away, Nicholas Beach set out on a Continental tour, and now, rid of the only discordant elements, the house was so quiet, so peacefully, harmoniously happy, that Margie felt almost as though she could have stayed there always—but for Harry's ship coming home some day.
Nurse came back a week after the departure of Nicholas, so Margie returned to her former duties and waited again on Mrs. Beach, more contented and at rest than she had been for long enough.
And so, quietly and restfully, after all the anxieties, time passed swiftly on, until Margie had been in Mrs. Beach's employment just a year. During the last month or two, Howard and Fay Logan, both supremely happy apparently, had called to see Margie, and Fay in her pretty clothes, and with the half-shyness of the bride hardly gone, looked so childlike and irresponsible that Margie could not find it in her heart to blame her. Fay was too light, too shallow, to have loved Harry as he deserved to be loved, and somehow Margie could easily forgive her; but how or why so easily, she did not stop to ask herself.
Meanwhile nothing was heard of Mabel Raye, except that once Clara found in a newspaper, a brief notice of a young actress in Mr. Charles Digby's touring company, who called herself Miss Mirabelle Maye, and who seemed to have become quite popular. The description of the new actress's appearance left no doubt as to her identity in the minds of those who knew every feature of her beautiful face, every line of that haughty and queenly form.
Poor Mrs. Beach wept bitterly when she read the notice. The ingratitude of this girl whom she had brought up from a baby was sharper pain than the bite of a serpent's tooth, and it seemed hard indeed that her only tidings of Mabel should have come thus casually through a newspaper.
Tenderly and regretfully, though with many tears, Mrs. Beach and Clara thought of and prayed for the wilful girl, though hardly daring to hope that their prodigal would come home to them at last.