It would take her a little time to recover herself and decide what to do. She must have leisure for reflection; and she took it that night in her room, and sat up the entire night thinking over the events of the last two years, as connected with Everard, and coming at last to the conclusion that he was a _scoundrel_, whom it was her duty as well as pleasure to punish by going to America at once and claiming him as her husband. In the first days of her sudden bereavement, Agnes’ kind heart had gone out with a great yearning for her young sister, to whom she had at once written of their mutual loss, saying how lonely she was, and how she hoped they would henceforth be more to each other than they ever had been. And Josephine had been touched and softened, and had written very kindly to Agnes, and had cried several times in secret for the dead mother she would never see again, but whose death she did not then see fit to announce to Mrs. Arnold; but she would do so now, and make it a pretext for going home at once. Nothing should keep her from wreaking swift vengeance on the man who had deliberately deceived her for two years, and who, she had no doubt, was faithless to her in feeling, if not in act. Of course there was a woman concerned in the matter, and that woman was probably Rossie Hastings, who, Mr. Evarts said, was still living at the Forrest House, whither she meant to go in her own person as Mrs. J. E. Forrest, and so rout the enemy, and establish her own claims as a much-injured wife. She did not mean to be violent or harsh, only grieved, and hurt, and forgiving, and she had no doubt that in time she should be the most popular woman in Rothsay, not even excepting Beatrice, whose silence with regard to the judge’s death she could not understand, inasmuch as she could have had no reason for keeping it a secret. It may seem strange that as a friend of Everard’s Phil Evarts had not heard of the judge’s will, but for the last two or three years he had led a wandering kind of life, and spent most of his time in Rio Janeiro, and as Everard had never spoken of his affairs on the few occasions they had met since the judge’s death, he was in total ignorance of the manner in which the judge had disposed of his property. Had he known it, and told Josephine, she might have acted differently, and hesitated a little before she gave up a situation of perfect ease and comparative luxury for the sake of a husband whom she did not love, and who had nothing for her support except his own earnings. But she did _not_ know this, and she was eager to confront him and _the jade_, as she stigmatized Rosamond, and she packed some of her clothes that night that she might start at once.