ndeed
to Lady Charlton. Rose would live now chiefly for Heaven and to soothe
the sorrows of earth. She did not say to herself that Rose would not be
broken-hearted and crushed, nor did she take long views. If years hence
Rose were to marry again her mother could make another picture in which
Sir David would recede into the background. Now he was her hero whom
Rose mourned, and whose loss had consecrated her more entirely to
Heaven; then he would unconsciously become in her mother's eyes a much
older man whom Rose had married almost as a child. There would be
nothing necessarily to mar the new picture if all else were fitting.

But the peace of gentle sorrow had left Rose's face, and it wore a look
her mother had never seen on it before. The breath of evil was close
upon her; it had penetrated very near, so near that she seemed evil to
herself as it embraced her. She was too dazed, too confused to remember
that Divine purity had been enclosed in that embrace. What terrified her
most was the thought that had suddenly come that possibly the unknown
woman in Florence had been the real lawful wife, and that her own
marriage had been a sin, a vile pretence and horror. For the first time
in her life the grandest words of confidence that have expressed and
interpreted the clinging faith of humanity seemed an unreality. Rose had
never known the faintest temptation to doubt Providence before this
miserable evening. She resented with her whole being the idea that
possibly she had been the cause of the grossest wrong to an injured
wife. And there was ground in reason for such a fear, for it seemed
difficult to believe that any claim short of that of a wife could have
frightened Sir David into such a course. The other and more common view,
that it was because he had loved his mistress throughout, did not appeal
to her. Vice had for her few recognisable features; she had no map for
the country of passion, no precedents to refer to. It seemed to Rose
most probable that Sir David had believed his first wife to be dead
when he married her; that, on finding he was mistaken, his courage had
failed, and that he had carried on a gigantic scheme of bribery to
prevent her coming forward. This view was in one sense a degree less
painful, as it would make him innocent of the first great deception, the
huge lie of making love to her as if he were a free man. The depths and
extent of her misery could be measured by the strange sense of a bitter
g