The Argosy — page 331: what you’re looking at

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

314 A Rare Case. inexplicable silence ; in the face of even a more ominous discovery made by Drew when in town—the discovery that he had never mentioned Mattie’s name to his mother, or alluded to Mattie at all. As for Adam, Mrs. Armitage had declared he was not with her then, and that she could not give an address that would find him: an assertion that confirmed Mattie in the idea that he had started on those far-away travels he had so often spoken of to her. As autumn passed and the evenings grew chill with the breath of the coming winter, Mattie’s health seemed to fail. The deep melancholy that oppressed her threatened to break the springs of life. In order to escape from Mrs. Bankes the girl took to lonely wanderings over the Downs; wanderings that ended always at Stonedene ; until, with the instinct of a wounded animal that seeks to endure its pain alone, or from the ever present recollection of the last words of Adam, when he had said it was by way of Stonedene that he would return, she besought the farmer to send away the woman in charge of the house and allow her to take her place. From the day of her marriage, merrily at first, and as though half amused at her rise in life, but later in the hope of giving her such comfort as might come from showing his own trust in Adam, Drew had been particular in addressing her by her new title. Mattie was as much soothed by this behaviour as she was ruffled by the opposite conduct of Mrs. Bankes. A certain little dignity of demeanour grew upon young Mrs, Armitage, who yet insisted upon earning her own bread, since Adam’s wife must not be dependent upon the charity of even so good a friend as the farmer. Drew yielded to the wish of the wife, whose heart was breaking with the pain of absence, and the mystery of silence, and Mattie, on this foggy day had already lived months at Stonedene, on the watch always for the coming of Adam. The fog increased instead of diminishing with the approach of evening. Drew could not see his own house until he was close to it; as he had remarked, the mystery of Mattie’s affairs was not more impenetrable than the veil hiding all natural objects just then. When he had put up the horse and gone in to tea, Mrs. Bankes, as she bustled about, preparing the meal that Mattie’s deft little fingers had been wont to set out with so much quietness as well as celerity, did not fail to greet him with the question: ‘‘ Well, how is she?” ‘‘She ” had come to mean Mattie in the vocabulary of the farmer and his sister. ‘‘ About as usual in health,” Drew replied, lifting the now five-year- old Harry to his knee; ‘‘but troubled in mind; though, to be sure, that is as usual too” ‘She is owt cf aer mind,” exclaimed Mrs. Bankes irritably. She had been fond of Mattie, and not indifferent to the value of so fine a subject for gossip as the stolen marriage and the disappearance of the bridegroom; but Mrs. Bankes had long ago wearied of the Gomichbooks.co