The Argosy — page 343: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

——se —_ . The Master of Greylands. 823 apply, she began to think*that she would have to put in practice the suggestion he had but spoken in jest, and go over to England to look after him. A short period of vacillation—for it looked like a frightfully formidable step to the untravelled young lady—and she resolved upon it. Arranging the affairs of her petit ménage, as she expressed st, she started off with her child ; and in due time reached London. There she stayed one night, after sending off a note, directed to her husband at Greylands, to tell of her intended arrival on the following day: and in the morning she took her seat in the Stilborough coach. Forewarned, forearmed, is an old saying. Anthony Castlemaine’s wife had been warned, and she strove to be armed. She would not present herself openly and in her own name at Greylands. If the Cas- tlemaine family were dealing hardly with her husband, it would be more prudent for her to go to work warily and appear there at first as a stran- ger. The worst she feared was, that Mr. James Castlemaine might be holding her husband somewhere at bay ; perhaps even had put him na prison—she did not understand the English laws—and she must seek him out and release him. So she called herself Guise. Her name had been Guise before her marriage, and she assumed it now. Not much of an assumption: in accordance with the French customs of her native place, she retained her maiden name as an affix to her husband’s and her cards were printed, Madame Castlemaine-Guise. Her intention had been to proceed to Stilborough, put up there, and come over to Greylands the following day ; but the little girl’s symptoms of feverish illness in the coach afforded a pretext for halting there. And so, here she was, at the often-heard-of Dolphin Inn, inhabiting the very chamber that her ill-fated husband had occupied, and with the dread story she had listened to beating its terrors in her brain. A gust of wind shook the white dimity curtain, drawn before the case- ment, and she turned to it with a shiver. What did this angry storm of wind mean? Why should it have ansen suddenly without apparent warning? Charlotte Guise was rather superstitious, and asked herself the question. When she got out of the coach at the inn door, the air and sea were calm. Could the angry disturbance have come to show her that the very elements were nsing at the wrong dealt out to her: husband? Some such an idea took hold of her. ‘Every second minute I ask whether it can be true,” she murmured in her native language, “‘or whether I have but dropped asleep in my own house and am dreaming it all. It is not like reality. Itis not like any story I ever heard before. Anthony comes over here, all those hundreds of weary miles, over that miserable sea, and finds himself amid his family ; his family whom he had never seen. Greylands’ Rest is mine, I think? he says to them; ‘will you give it/to me?’ And they deny that itis his. ‘Then,’ says he ‘what you say may be so ; but you should just show me the deeds—the proofs tha’ chin msomine,?’oo