It had been a long, dreary year to Everard, and when the anniversary came round of the day when Rossie sailed, it seemed to him that he had lived in that year more than a hundred lives. And yet, in a business point of view he had been very prosperous, and money was beginning to be more plenty with him than formerly, though he could not lay by much, for Josephine made heavy demands upon him. When she left Florida she did not return to Rothsay, where she knew she was looked upon with distrust by the better class. It was a _dull, poky hole_, she said, and she should enjoy herself better traveling, so she traveled from place to place during the summer and autumn, and in the winter went again to Florida,—but early in the spring she came back to the Forrest House, where she lived very quietly, and seemed to shun rather than court society. She, too, knew of Rossie’s failing health, for she heard often from the doctor, and she expressed so much anxiety for her to Beatrice and Everard, hinting that they did not know the worst, that their fears were increased, and suspense was growing intolerable, when, at last, one morning in May, the mail brought to Everard the _American Register_ from Paris, directed in a hand he had never seen before. Evidently it was sent from the office, and probably had in it the whereabouts of some of his friends who were traveling in Europe, and who occasionally forwarded him a paper when they left one place for another. Mr. Evarts was still abroad, and Everard ran his eye over the list of names registered in different places to see if his was there, for that the paper had anything to do with Rossie he never dreamed. Indeed, she was not in his mind, except as she was always there, in a general way, and so the shock was all the greater and more terrible when he came suddenly upon a little obituary notice, and read, with wildly-throbbing heart, and eyes which felt as if they were starting from their sockets, so great was the pressure of blood upon his brain: “Died, on the evening of April 20th, in Haelder-Strauchsen, Austria, of consumption and heart disease, Miss Rosamond Hastings, of Rothsay, Ohio, U. S. A., aged nineteen years and ten months. Seldom has death snatched any one more lovely in person and character than this fair young girl, who, in a strange land, far from home, passed peacefully and willingly to the home above, and whose last words to her weeping brother were: ‘Don’t cry for me, and tell them at home not to be sorry either. Heaven is as near me here in Austria as it would be in America, and I am so glad to go.’”