The Argosy — page 139: what you’re looking at

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

124 Featherstows Story. which was the excuse he gave Nancy for departing. Rely upon it that what he heard about the Mr. Dangerfield on the pier drove him away.” ‘¢Well, that looks suspicious, you see.” ‘* Oh, yes, I do see it,” I answered, unable to conceal the pain I felt. Tt was a bitter calamity, Major Smith, when Nancy married him.” T’ll make a few cautious inquiries in the town and try to find out if there’s anything against him in secret, or if any man named Dan- gerfield has been in the place and got intoa mess. But, indeed, I don’t altogether see that it could apply to him,” concluded the Major after a pause. ‘‘One can’t well go under two names in the same town ; and everyone knows him as Edwin Fennel.——Here they are some of them coming back!” And when the wanderers were close up, they found Major Smith arguing with me about the archi- tecture of the castle. Ten o’clock. Time for bed. Jam in no haste to go, for I don’t sleep as well as I used to sleep. A thought has lately sometimes crossed me that this miserable trouble worries me more than it ought to do. ‘‘ Accept it as your cross, and yze/d to it, Lavinia,” says Mary Cardiac to me. But I cannot yield to it; that is, I cannot in the least diminish the anxiety which always clings to me, or forget the distress and dread that lie upon me like a shadow. I know that my life has been on the whole an easy life, that during all the years I spent at Selby Court I never had any trouble ; I know that crosses do come to us all, earlier or later, and that I ought not to be surprised that ‘no new thing has happened tome,” the world being full of such experiences. I suppose it is because I have been so exempt from care, that I feel this the more. > Half-past ten! just half-an-hour writing these last few lines and thizking / Time I put up. I wonder when I shall hear from Nancy ? Tit. A curious phase, taken in conjunction with what was to follow, now occurred in the history. Miss Preen began to experience a nervous dread at going into the petite Maison Rouge at night. She could go into the house ten times a day when it was empty ; she could stay in the house alone in the evening after Flore took her departure; she could be its only inmate all night long; and never at these times have the slightest sense of fear. But if she went out to spend the evening, she felt an unaccountable dread, amounting to horror, at entering it when she arrived home. It came on suddenly. One evening when Lavinia had been at Mrs. Hardy’s, Charley Palliser having run over to London, she re- turned home a little before ten o’clock. Opening the door with her latch-key, she was stepping into the passage, when a sharp horror of entering it seized her. A dread, as it seemed to her, of going into COMIC OOOMKS . EC) =} = i ae het