ot crying, but feeling as if she were being
inwardly grappled. Her face had become of a deathlier paleness, her
lips trembled, and she pressed her hands helplessly on the hands that
lay under them.

Rosamond, taken hold of by an emotion stronger than her own--hurried
along in a new movement which gave all things some new, awful,
undefined aspect--could find no words, but involuntarily she put her
lips to Dorothea's forehead which was very near her, and then for a
minute the two women clasped each other as if they had been in a
shipwreck.

"You are thinking what is not true," said Rosamond, in an eager
half-whisper, while she was still feeling Dorothea's arms round
her--urged by a mysterious necessity to free herself from something
that oppressed her as if it were blood guiltiness.

They moved apart, looking at each other.

"When you came in yesterday--it was not as you thought," said Rosamond
in the same tone.

There was a movement of surprised attention in Dorothea. She expected
a vindication of Rosamond herself.

"He was telling me how he loved another woman, that I might know he
could never love me," said Rosamond, getting more and more hurried as
she went on. "And now I think he hates me because--because you
mistook him yesterday. He says it is through me that you will think
ill of him--think that he is a false person. But it shall not be
through me. He has never had any love for me--I know he has not--he
has always thought slightly of me. He said yesterday that no other
woman existed for him beside you. The blame of what happened is
entirely mine. He said he could never explain to you--because of me.
He said you could never think well of him again. But now I have told
you, and he cannot reproach me any more."

Rosamond had delivered her soul under impulses which she had not known
before. She had begun her confession under the subduing influence of
Dorothea's emotion; and as she went on she had gathered the sense that
she was repelling Will's reproaches, which were still like a
knife-wound within her.

The revulsion of feeling in Dorothea was too strong to be called joy.
It was a tumult in which the terrible strain of the night and morning
made a resistant pain:--she could only perceive that this would be joy
when she had recovered her power of feeling it. Her immediate
consciousness was one of immense sympathy without cheek; she cared for
Rosamond without struggle now, and responded earnestly