Rosalind spent a very restless night. She could not sleep, and the rain coming down in torrents irritated her with its ceaseless pattering. She thought, she could not tell why, of the poor people who were out in it--travellers, wayfarers, poor vagrants, such as she had seen about the country roads. What would the miserable creatures do in such a dismal night? As she lay awake in the darkness she pictured them to herself, drenched and cold, dragging along the muddy ways. No one in whom she was interested was likely to be reduced to such misery, but she thought of them, she could not tell why. She had knocked at Mrs. Trevanion’s door as she came up-stairs, longing to go in to say another word, to give her a kiss in her weariness. Rosalind had an ache and terrible question in her heart which she had never been able to get rid of, notwithstanding the closeness of the intercourse on the funeral day and the exuberant profession of faith to which she had given vent: “You can do no wrong.” Her heart had cried out this protestation of faith, but in her mind there had been a terrible drawing back, like that of the wave which has dashed brilliantly upon a stony beach only to groan and turn back again, carrying everything with it. Through all this sleepless night she lay balancing between these two sensations--the enthusiasm and the doubt. Her mother! It seemed a sort of blasphemy to judge or question that highest of all human authorities--that type and impersonation of all that was best. And yet it would force itself upon her, in spite of all her holding back. Where was she going that night? Supposing the former events nothing, what, oh, what was the new-made widow going to do on the eve of her husband’s funeral out in the park, all disguised and concealed in the dusk? The more Rosalind denied her doubts expression the more bitterly did that picture force itself upon her--the veiled, muffled figure, the watching accomplice, and the door so stealthily opened. Without practice and knowledge and experience, who could have done all that? If Rosalind herself wanted to steal out quietly, a hundred hinderances started up in her way. If she tried anything of the kind she knew very well that every individual whom she wished to avoid would meet her and find her out. It is so with the innocent, but with those who are used to concealment, not so. These were the things that said themselves in her mind without any consent of hers as she labored through the night. And when the first faint sounds of waking began to be audible, a distant door opening, an indication that some one was stirring, Rosalind got up too, unable to bear it any longer. She sprang out of bed and wrapped herself in her dressing-gown, resolved to go to her mother’s room and disperse all those ghosts of night. How often had she run there in childish troubles and shaken them off! That last court of appeal had never been closed to her. A kiss, a touch of the soft hand