scious of an indifference she could not master,
and whose foundation was anger and annoyance. But when her mother had
sobbed her passion of grief away, and lay white, still and exhausted
in her chair, Rose went to her side, and kissed the tears off her
cheeks, and said with an accent of deep injury:

"Mamma, dear mamma! You are making your head ache for nothing at all.
Every one of the girls I know take a teaspoonful of brandy now and
then, when they are tired and sick. Harry does the same thing very
often. Why should he blame me? And then for _you_ to act as if I had
committed some dreadful crime! It is too bad! You might have faith in
your daughter. No wonder so many people treat me shyly, when you come
to my room to insult me. Oh, mamma, it is too cruel! It is too cruel!
It is, indeed!"

Then mother and daughter wept together, and things were said between
them far too sacred to be put into words--confessions, that had no
articulate form; promises, that were never to be broken; sympathy,
alliance, love invincible, hoping all things, believing all things!
And when at length "good-night" was kissed, not spoken, there was an
air of solemnity on Mrs. Filmer's face that the world had never seen
there, not even in church; and Rose was white as a lily, and her fair
head drooped, and her heart was heavy, though not quite uncomforted.
Long after her mother had gone away, the girl sat quiet as a stone,
half-undressed, with sleep far from her eyes and her conscience wide
awake; and it was not until the clock of a neighboring church struck
three that she roused herself and began to finish her preparations for
sleep.

"It is so hard to be good, and yet I do so long to be good!" she
muttered; and then, because it had been her life-long custom, she fell
upon her knees and clasped her hands; and a sacred fear suddenly
encompassed her, and she was quite silent. Nevertheless, the
struggling soul--sleepless and foreseeing--cried out to the
All-Merciful; and so, though she knew it not, she prayed.

CHAPTER VI

Miss Alida might well congratulate herself on the interesting
entanglements which she had voluntarily brought into her own placid
life. Day by day, they grew into her heart, and gave that human zest
to her employments and amusements, that their mere forms could never
have done. A ball-room in which Rose was to watch, and Antony was to
advise or sympathize with, was something more than a space for
dancing. In the thea