The girl from nowhere

by Mrs. Baillie Reynolds

And now she was educated. Moreover, she was a woman grown. And Miss Rawson had brought her home from France, wondering not a little as to what the outcome of the situation was to be.

During all these two years there had been, so far as she was aware, no attempt to gain possession of the girl, certainly no annoyance of her, on the part of the uncle who was supposed to be so malign a being.

Had it not been for the girl's own personality, Miss Rawson, who was a sensible, unimaginative woman, would have been inclined to think that the tale of persecution was the invention of the brother, as a way of extricating his sister and himself from destitution. But, in some manner wholly indescribable, Rona refuted this theory, simply by being Rona.

Miss Rawson, who had been her companion for four or five weeks each summer, had seen a good deal of her, and was not an easy person to deceive. She knew well enough that the girl believed herself to have cause to dread something, or someone. Under the keen scrutiny of Miss Rawson's criticism, there had never appeared one trait, one phrase, which was out of harmony with Rona's claim to gentle birth and breeding. Her tastes were innately fastidious. In all the small minutiæ of a refined girl's habits, she was above reproach. Her convent breeding had given her an atmosphere of purity and simplicity, upon which the modern culture of her later education sat with a curious charm. But there was more than this underlying the fascination which the elder woman felt but could not classify. She was only conscious of thinking that Rona was the most attractive maiden she had ever seen. There was not a girl of their acquaintance who could hold a candle to her. She was more than pretty, she was truly beautiful, with a somewhat grave beauty, as of one over whom hung some menace or anxiety.

But at the nature of this anxiety Miss Rawson could make no guess.

Rona had left the gravel now, and her feet trod the shorn turf, her white gown slipping over its verdure like lake-foam over water-weed. She had dignity, she had poise, those things now most rare in the modern girl, who is generally ill-assured, in spite of her free-and-easy pose. But under the fine calm of her manner there was a shadow.

Rona carried a secret in her heart. This secret, at first half-delightful, had gradually grown to be a distress, a burden—at last an out-and-out nightmare. Within a few days of her parting from Felix in the summer-house she was feeling strongly the discomfort of the situation in which he had placed her.

She was secretly betrothed to the young man who posed as her brother!

She saw plainly that David must naturally be unwilling that his own prison record should be known. But why should he insist upon her adhering to the brother-and-sister fiction? She thought the deceit unnecessary and unwise, since when he returned to claim her promise, their true relations must be avowed, and she would stand convicted of a long course of deception and untruth.

For the first week or so after her promise, so readily, so ignorantly given, she had suffered horribly. And the climax of her revolt came when she received, from Hamburg, his first wild love-letter.