But my fears for Magdalen do not begin and end with the risk she is running at present.
"There has been something weighing on her mind ever since we left Combe-Raven--weighing far more heavily for the last six weeks than at first.

Until the period when Francis Clare left England, I am persuaded she was secretly sustained by the hope that he would contrive to see her again.

From the day when she knew that the measures you had taken for preventing this had succeeded; from the day when she was assured that the ship had really taken him away, nothing has roused, nothing has interested her.

She has given herself up, more and more hopelessly, to her own brooding thoughts; thoughts which I believe first entered her mind on the day when the utter ruin of the prospects on which her marriage depended was made known to her.

She has formed some desperate project of contesting the possession of her father's fortune with Michael Vanstone; and the stage career which she has gone away to try is nothing more than a means of freeing herself from all home dependence, and of enabling her to run what mad risks she pleases, in perfect security from all home control.