The Argosy — page 274: what you’re looking at

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

Winifred Power. 255 “Ridgeley ?” mused Mark. ‘I do not remember him. Perhaps he belongs to the Marleyford days, when I was a boy. ‘They have faded from my memory in a great degree.” “Then I am afraid that you also will be unable to tell me who Mademoiselle Marthe can have been,” said the girl, disappointed. “T asked Sir John one day, but he apparently remembered nothing.” Sir John indeed had seemed very much out of humour that day, and Winifred almost fancied—only of course it could only be fancy ! —had been a little changed in his manner ever since. ‘Who is she?” inquired Mark. Winifred told him Mademoiselle Marthe’s story as much as she knew or guessed of it. He listened, interested in her warmth and evident conviction—ainterested, too, in her vivid description of the little old woman: but he could not throw much light on the matter. ‘Your story recals an incident which took great hold of my childish imagination,” he said. “I remember just such a little woman as you describe, coming, like the malignant fairy to the princess’s christening, an uninvited guest to Aunt Mary’s wedding, and spreading dismay among us. I, a child, was dressed in some absurd costume as a page, and was holding up the bride’s train. All at once this poor madwoman, who was, I fancy, a kind of a relative of ours, pressed her way through the crowd and stood looking about her wildly. And, now I come to think of it, her name was Martha also.” “© Martha?” Winifred dropped her brush and turned to Mark with a startled face. For she remembered that in her ravings Mademoiselle Marthe had called incessantly on ‘ Mary.” CHAPTER XII. WINIFRED’S DISCOVERIES. THE idea which Mark had so unconsciously awakened took possession of Winifred’s mind. A hundred times a day she cast it from her with horror, but still it returned, strengthened continually by her knowledge of Mrs. Russell’s character. Her devotion to her uncle had never availed to blind her to the essential selfishness and heartlessness of his wife. Winifred, with a clearness of insight that came from her own crystal candour, knew her for what she was— shallow, self-indulgent, apathetic habitually, and occasionally violent. Some faint suggestions in Mademoiselle Marthe’s ravings, disregarded at the time, came back to Winifred now with all the vividness of proof. Some certainty she felt she must have; she could not live with such a suspicion and not seek to dispel or to confirm it. Mark, she naturally shrank from questioning, a vague instinct warning her that the mystery whose veil she was about to lift, probably involved Sir John as well as his sister. The very notion of some great com- COMA (9) lNOOKS.EO