Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 097.djvu/433

Rh She stood still as a post

"Produce them," repeated her father, "before I give vent to the passion you have called up, and am tempted to strike you."

She shivered and trembled, holding the back of a chair for support; but she opened the cabinet, and took out the letters. On the top of them lay the epistle she had begun to James Ailsa the previous morning, and had thrust away in her haste when interrupted by her sister. It of course came forth with the others, but Emily, hoping she was not observed, flung it back.

"What paper is that?" cried Mr. Bell; "what are you trying to put back?"

She faltered out something about "some poetry."

"Give it me with the rest," screamed Mr. Bell; "how dare you attempt to trifle with me? You may have your poetry again when I have looked at it—if it is poetry."

He snatched it, with the letters, from her hand, and the first words that caught his gaze were, "My dearest James." Two or three lines of little import followed—the cream of Emily's letters was seldom at the beginning. Mr. Bell tore the paper into the smallest particles, and with a glance of unutterable rage at Emily, advanced to the window and scattered them to the winds.

"Are these all?" he demanded, pointing to the packet which he held in his hand.

"Yes; all," faltered Emily.

"Open the place again that I may see for myself," returned Mr. Bell. "I cannot trust you."

"Papa," she cried, clasping her hands in terror, lest he should execute his threat, and so find that Mr. James Ailsa had not been her first correspondent in the love-letter line, "on my word, on my honour, they are all. I never received so much as a sentence or a scrap of paper from him besides. The letters themselves will prove that they are all."

It was impossible to doubt that she spoke the truth, and Mr. Bell stalked out of the room with the letters in his hand. Emily sank into a chair, and sobbed aloud.

Somehow or other, all this gossip went forth to the village, and with innumerable exaggerations. Also the account of Mr. Bell's stormy interview with James Ailsa, when the latter was compelled to give up Emily's letters to him, in the midst of contemptuous jeers and taunts at a paltry, penniless surgeon's assistant presuming to think of Miss Emily Bell. The next news Ebury heard was, that Ailsabut there's something to relate first.

It was one of the most wretched nights that November ever turned out—cold, rainy, and boisterous. A light shone in the curtained window of Emily Bell's sleeping apartment: she herself was there, wretched as the weather, having been ordered, ever since the explosion, to keep her own chamber. This was a severe punishment for Emily, whose whole existence lay in the exercise of her flirting talents. She was sitting, dull enough, in a low rocking-chair, which she had fetched out of the nursery, swaying herself backwards and forwards, wishing bedtime was come, when Margaret would be up, or that the term of her punishment was at an end, when a rattling at the window, as of gravel thrown