And Rosalind gradually, but nevertheless fully, came out of the shadow of that blighting cloud. What is there in human misery which can permanently crush a heart under twenty? Nothing, at least save the last and most intolerable of personal losses, and even then only in the case of a passionate, undisciplined soul or a feeble body. Youth will overcome everything if it has justice and fresh air and occupation. And Rosalind made her way out of all the ways of gloom and misery to the sky and sunshine. Her memory had, indeed, an indelible scar upon it at that place. She could not turn back and think of the extraordinary mystery and anguish of that terrible moment without a convulsion of the heart, and sense that all the foundations of the earth had been shaken. But happily, at her age, there is not much need of turning back upon the past. She shivered when the momentary recollection crossed her mind, but could always throw it off and come back to the present, to the future, which are always so much more congenial. This great catastrophe, which made a sort of chasm between her and her former life, had given a certain maturity to Rosalind. At twenty she had already much of the dignity, the self-possession, the seriousness of a more advanced age. She had something of the air of a young married woman, a young mother, developed by the early experiences of life. The mere freshness of girlhood, even when it is most exquisite, has a less perfect charm than this; and the fact that Rosalind was still a girl, notwithstanding the sweet and noble gravity of her responsible position, added to her an exceptional charm. She was supposed by most people to be five years at least older than she was: and she was the mother of her brothers and sisters, at once more and less than a mother; perhaps less anxious, perhaps more indulgent, not old enough to perceive with the same clearness or from the same point of view, seeing from the level of the children more than perhaps a mother can. To see her with her little brother in her lap was the most lovely of pictures. Something more exquisite even than maternity was in this virgin-motherhood. She was a better type of the second mother than any wife. This made a sort of halo around the young creature who had so many responsibilities. But yet in her heart Rosalind was only a girl; the other half of her had not progressed beyond where it was before that great crisis. There was within her a sort of decisive consciousness of the apparent maturity which she had thus acquired, and she only such a child--a girl at heart.