“My dear, you are excited; you do not know what you are saying. Put it away, put it away, if you will have it; but do not speak of an unhappy girrl in the same breath with Charlie’s wife. That must never be; and such a thing should never, never have come into your hands.” Marjory hurried away almost angry, with her letters in her hand. She could ask counsel from no one else; and here she had failed; she rushed back to her room with them, very sad at heart; she, to make herself the champion of the unknown girl, whose very existence had seemed to her no later than yesterday, such a sin and shame! CHAPTER XIV. It would be vain to attempt to trace the manner in which this revulsion of feeling came about. Marjory had gone through the whole gamut of emotions in respect to the letter which she had found in Tom’s desk. First shame, indignation, and the hardest sentence with which women can damn a woman. Then a wavering of the balance, a protestation of justice against the hasty verdict which might have no foundation. Then a sense of escape and gratitude that no harm had come of it; and last of all, a tremulous feeling of pity, perhaps the first Christian sentiment of the whole, but the only one of which Marjory was ashamed. The thing, however, which all at once had made this pity into sudden sympathy was the letter of Mrs. Charles--a woman about whom there could be no controversy. Charlie’s equal--Charlie’s most lawful wife, under all the regulations and safeguards that law and religion could give. When she placed the one letter by the other, Marjory’s heart swelled with a sudden indignant vindication of the poor unknown girl who had loved her brother. All at once Isabell became a distinct individual, almost a friend. A sudden protest against all her own suspicions arose in her mind; she acquitted the girl of everything as she had accused her of everything. The process of thought was easy enough--its very suddenness was natural. She went to the quietness of her room in which she had first read Isabell’s letter with such a tempest of shame and humiliation, with very different feelings, contrasting Matilda’s letter with this other one, and asking herself, with a vehemence of indignation which surprised her, which of them was the least womanly--which the more true and real. Her emotion, however, though she was not aware of it, was not all founded upon this contrast. In point of fact, it afforded a certain outlet to her excitement, and solaced her in the misery of her suspense. She locked up the letters in her jewel case, with a fantastic sense of their importance; she turned the little silver key upon them, as if she had been imprisoning two potent spirits. Some day or other, the prisoners would be liberated, and come forth, each to fight her own battle. Marjory was sane enough still to smile at her own fantastic force of imagination as this thought crossed her mind--to smile at it