Margaret herself, with a discernment beyond her years, had felt the high tone of this lady's character, and the "proud sensibility" expressed in her changing countenance. From her she could learn the lesson of hope and of comfort. Listening to the story, she no longer repulsed the hand of healing, but took patiently the soothing medicine offered by her visitor.
This story of Margaret's school life she herself has told, in an episode called "Marianna," which was published in her "Summer on the Lakes," and afterwards embodied in Mr. Clarke's contribution to the memoir already published. We have already quoted several passages from it, and will here give her account of the end of the whole matter.
"She returned to life, but it was as one who has passed through the valley of death. The heart of stone was quite broken in her; the fiery will fallen from flame to coal.
"When her strength was a little restored, she had all her companions summoned, and said to them: 'I deserved to die, but a generous trust has called me back to life. I will be worthy of the past, nor ever betray the trust, or resent injury more. Can you forgive the past?' And," says the narrative, "they not only forgave, but with love and earnest tears clasped in their arms the returning sister. They vied with one another in offices of humble love to the humbled one; and let it be recorded, as an instance of the pure honor of which young hearts are capable, that these facts, known to some forty persons, never, so far as I know, transpired beyond those walls."
In making this story public, we may believe Margaret to have been actuated by a feeling of the value of such an experience both in the study of character and in the discipline of young minds. Here was a girl, really a child in age, but already almost a woman in selfhood and imagination. Untrained in intercourse with her peers in age, she felt and exaggerated her own superiority to those with whom her school life first brought her in contact. This superiority she felt impelled to assert and maintain. So long as she could queen it over the other pupils she was content. The first serious wounding of her self-love aroused in her a vengeful malignity, which grew with its own exercise. Unable as she found herself to command her little public by offices which had seemed to her acts of condescension, she determined to rule through the evil principle of discord. In a fortunate moment she was arrested in this course by an exposure whose consequences showed her the reflection of her own misconduct in the minds of those around her. Extreme in all things, her self-reproach took the form of helpless despair, which yet, at the touch of true affection, gave way before the courageous determination to retrieve past error by future good desert.