Forty minutes later, and from the seat by the door, a little bent, weird-looking woman arose, and making her way through the crowd, advanced until she stood upon the stage, then stretching her long, bony finger toward Arabella, who had returned, she said, ‘I am a lover of justice, and should I hold my peace, the very stones would cry out against me. Yonder young lady has no right to the prize, for the piece which she has palmed off as her own appeared in the Woodland Gazette, a paper published in an obscure New Hampshire village. How she came by it, she can, perhaps, explain, but I cannot.’
At the commencement of this strange speech, Arabella arose as if to defy the woman, who was thus blasting her good name, but at the mention of the Woodland Gazette she fainted and was carried from the room. Madame Duvant now came forward and addressed a few, low spoken words to the woman, who answered aloud, ‘I have the best of reasons for what I have said. My son, who lives in New Hampshire, occasionally sends me the Gazette, and in one number, which came nearly a year ago, appeared this very article, taken originally from an old English paper.’
‘Prove it! Produce the paper!’ fiercely ejaculated Mrs. Greenleaf, as she left the room in quest of her daughter.
‘I can do so,’ answered the woman; ‘I never tore up a newspaper in my life, and if the audience will wait for the space of ten minutes, I can show them the very article’—saying which she glided noiselessly from the room.
She was a strange, half-crazy old creature, of wonderful memory, who occupied a small cottage in the suburbs of the village, and many doubts were expressed as to the veracity of her statement. But these were soon put to flight by her reappearance. Unfolding the dingy yellow paper, she read aloud to her astonished hearers the article which proved to have been taken from the London Examiner. There was no longer a shadow of doubt, and the prize was withdrawn from the treacherous Arabella, and as Mildred’s composition was pronounced the next in order, it was bestowed upon her.
Mortified, indignant and almost frantic at this public disgrace, Arabella finally confessed to having stolen the piece from a paper sent her some months before by a former schoolmate. The next morning she left the village, heaping her pent-up wrath upon the head of her innocent cousin, who was destined in more ways than one to rival her.
Three months had passed away since the night of the exhibition, and in a private parlour at a London hotel sat George Clayton, rather impatiently awaiting the return of his servant from the post-office. As yet he had received no letter from Arabella, for though she had written it had failed to reach him, and while in the Old World was marvelling at her long delay, she in the New was wondering why he did not answer. The mortification which she had endured affected her deeply, bringing on at last a slow fever, which confined her to her bed, where for weeks she lay, carefully attended by Mildred, who once, when she complained of George’s neglect, suggested the possibility of his not having received the letter. This was a new idea to Arabella, and as she was herself unable to write, she persuaded Mildred to do it for her, and strange to say, the two letters reached their destination at the same time.
With eager haste George took them from his servant, who soon went out leaving him alone. The handwriting of both was not alike, and in some trepidation the young man broke the seal of the one bearing the more recent date. It was beautifully written, and mentally complimenting the fair writer, George opened the other, uttering an exclamation of surprise ere he had read a dozen lines. It was sickly, sentimental affair, taken partly from an old letter writer, and containing many high-flown sentences concerning the ‘pearling rill,’ the ‘silvery starlite’ and the ‘rozy mora,’ which, being spelled as they were, presented a most formidable aspect to the fastidious young man.
Although Arabella had taken much pains with her letter, at least one-fourth of the words were misspelt, and by the time George had finished reading, he entertained no other feeling towards the writer than the one of disgust, to think that, with all her showy accomplishments, she had neglected what to him was the most important of all, for in nothing is the ignorance of a young lady more apparent than in a badly-spelled letter. It was a long time ere he answered it, and then the few lines which he wrote were so cold, so different from his first, that in a fit of anger Arabella tossed it into the fire, repenting the act the moment after, and, as if to make amends, writing in return a long letter, to which there came no response, and thus the correspondence ended.