“Wait a little, Norah. Our shares come to us in very different ways.”
“Do they? Mine comes to me by my husband. Yours comes to you—” She stopped confusedly, and changed color. “Forgive me, my own love!” she said, putting Magdalen’s hand to her lips. “I have forgotten what I ought to have remembered. I have thoughtlessly distressed you!”
“No!” said Magdalen; “you have encouraged me.”
“Encouraged you?”
“You shall see.”
With those words, she rose quietly from the sofa, and walked to the open window. Before Norah could follow her, she had torn the Trust to pieces, and had cast the fragments into the street.
She came back to the sofa and laid her head, with a deep sigh of relief, on Norah’s bosom. “I will owe nothing to my past life,” she said. “I have parted with it as I have parted with those torn morsels of paper. All the thoughts and all the hopes belonging to it are put away from me forever!”
“Magdalen, my husband will never allow you! I will never allow you myself—”
“Hush! hush! What your husband thinks right, Norah, you and I will think right too. I will take from you what I would never have taken if that letter had given it to me. The end I dreamed of has come. Nothing is changed but the position I once thought we might hold toward each other. Better as it is, my love—far, far better as it is!”
So she made the last sacrifice of the old perversity and the old pride. So she entered on the new and nobler life.