“Oh, Madam, kill me!” Russell cried. That was the last that was seen in England of Madam Trevanion. The woman, overcome with passion, remorse, and long fasting and misery, fainted outright at her mistress’s feet. And when she came to herself the lady and her maid were both gone, and were seen by her no more. CHAPTER XXVI. There is nothing more strange in all the experiences of humanity than the manner in which a great convulsion either in nature or in human history ceases after a while to affect the world. Grass grows and flowers wave over the soil which an earthquake has rent asunder; and the lives of men are similarly torn in twain without leaving a much more permanent result. The people whom we see one year crushed by some great blow, when the next has come have begun to pursue their usual course again. This means no infidelity of nature, no forgetting; but only the inevitable progress by which the world keeps going. There is no trouble, however terrible, that does not yield to the touch of time. Some two years after these events Rosalind Trevanion felt herself, almost against her will, emerging out of the great shadow which had overwhelmed her life. She had been for a time swallowed up in the needs of the family, all her powers demanded for the rearrangement of life on its new basis, and everything less urgent banished from her. But by degrees the most unnatural arrangements fall into the calm of habit, the most unlooked-for duties become things of every day. Long before the period at which this history resumes, it had ceased to be wonderful to any one that Rosalind should take her place as head of the desolated house. She assumed unconsciously that position of sister-mother which is one of the most touching and beautiful that exist, with the ease which necessity brings--not asking how she could do it, but doing it; as did the bystanders who criticise every course of action and dictate what can and what cannot be done, but who all accepted her in her new duties with a composure which soon made everybody forget how strange, how unlikely, to the girl those duties were. The disappearance of the mother, the breaking-up of the house, was no doubt a nine-days’ wonder, and gave occasion in the immediate district for endless discussions; but the wonder died out as every wonder dies out. Outside of the county it was but vaguely known, and to those who professed to tell the details with authority there was but a dull response; natural sentiment at a distance being all against the possibility that anything so extraordinary and odious could be true. “You may depend upon it, a woman who was going to behave so at the end must have shown signs of it from the beginning,” people said, and the propagation of the rumor was thus seriously discouraged. Mrs. Lennox, though she was not wise, had enough of good sense and good feeling not to tell even to her most intimate friends the circumstances of her sister-in-law’s disappearance; and this