An hour later they stood together by the half-kindled fire in the hall. John Trevanion had gone through the empty rooms with his niece, who was distracted, not knowing what she did. By this time a pale and gray daylight, which looked like cold and misery made visible, had diffused itself through the great house. That chill visibleness, showing all the arrangements of the room prepared for rest and slumber, where nobody had slept, had something terrible in it that struck them both with awe. There was no letter, no sign to be found of leave-taking. When they opened the wardrobe and drawers, a few dresses and necessaries were found to be gone, and it appeared that Jane had sent two small boxes to the village which she had represented to be old clothes, “colored things,” for which her mistress would now have no need. It was to Rosalind like a blow in the dark, a buffet from some ghostly hand, additional to her other pain, when she found it was these “colored things” and not the prepared, newly made mourning which her stepmother had taken with her. This seemed a cutting off from them, an entire abandonment, which made her misery deeper; but naturally John Trevanion did not think of that. He told her the story of the will while they stood together in the hall. But he could think of nothing to do, nor could he give any hope that this terrible event was a thing to be undone or concealed. “It must have happened,” he said, “sooner or later; and though it is a shock--a great shock--” “Oh, Uncle John, it is--there was never anything so terrible. How can you use ordinary words? A shock! If the wind had blown down a tree it would be a shock. Don’t you see, it is the house that has been blown down? we have nothing--nothing to shelter us, we children. My mother and my father! We are orphans, and far, far worse than orphans. We having nothing left but shame--nothing but shame!” “Rosalind, it is worse for the others than for you. You, at least, are clear of it; she is not your mother.” “She is all the mother I have ever known,” Rosalind cried for the hundredth time. “And,” she added, with quivering lips, “I am the daughter of the man who on his death-bed has brought shame upon his own, and disgraced the wife that was like an angel to him. If the other could be got over, that can never be got over. He did it, and he cannot undo it. And she is wicked too. She should not have yielded like that; she should have resisted--she should have refused; she should not have gone away.” “Had she done so it would have been our duty to insist upon it,” said John Trevanion, sadly. “We had no alternative. You will find when you think it over that this sudden going is for the best.” “Oh, that is so easy to say when it is not your heart that is wrung, but some one else’s; and how can it ever be,” cried Rosalind, with a dismal logic which many have employed before her, “that what is all wrong from beginning to end can be for the best?”