It now becomes necessary to ascertain what passed before Isaac Sharpe, looking down through the willow-bushes, descried Richard Marshall in such close proximity to Mrs. Fiander. Nothing certainly was farther from Rosalie’s thoughts when she had taken refuge in that sheltered spot from the glare of the afternoon sun than the expectation of the advent of this companion. She had, in fact, quite decided that he was by this time out of the country, and had, indeed, made up her mind to erase his image definitely from her memory. Henceforward, as she frequently told herself, she must think only of Isaac—Isaac, who had always been her friend, who was so soon to be her husband. Her husband!—she must face the thought though she unconsciously shrank from it. Oh, would—would that this sweet cup of forbidden love had never been held to her lips! She had dashed it from her, but the taste of it remained and had taken all the savour out of her life. It had been to her a poisonous cup, containing as it did wine from the fruit of the tree of knowledge. ‘_You know very little of life_,’ Richard had said to her once. Alas, alas! she knew now more than enough. ‘Oh, Elias—poor Elias,’ she groaned to herself sometimes, ‘why did you die? If you had lived I should have known nothing—I should have guessed at nothing. I might have gone down to my grave without knowing that there was any other love besides that which I gave you.’ As an antidote to the rebellious longing of which she was too often conscious, Rosalie had recourse to the panacea she had hitherto found unfailing in times of affliction: hard work. Since the writing of that letter to Richard, and the subsequent battle with herself, she had resumed her old energetic habits. Once more she rose with the dawn, once more she passed hours in toil no less arduous than that allotted to her servants. She avoided solitude as much as possible, and strove by every means in her power to tire herself out. So tired was she, indeed, on this particular afternoon, that, having sought the friendly shade of the grassy nook already referred to, she acknowledged herself to be incapable of further effort. Even when the great heat had somewhat abated, and the retreating voices and heavy tread of her labourers as they trooped homewards warned her that it was growing late, she sat on, her hands clasping her knees, her eyes gazing vacantly on the ground, too weary even to think.