“Why? that goes without saying, Rosalind. Your father, to my mind, has never been so bad; and your-- I mean Madam--” “You mean my mother, Uncle John. Well! is she not my mother? I have never known any other. Poor dear little mamma was younger than I am. I never knew her. She is an angel in heaven, and she cannot be jealous of any one on earth. So you think that because papa has never been so ill, and my mother never had so much to bear, it would be the right thing for me, the eldest, the one that can be of most use, to go away?” “She has her own children, Rosalind.” “Yes, to be sure. Rex, who is at school, and knows about as much of what she needs as the dogs do; and little Sophy, who is barely nine. You must think very little of Rosalind, uncle, if you think these children can make up for me.” “I think a great deal of Rosalind; but we must be reasonable. I thought a woman’s own children, however little worth they may be in themselves, were more to her than any one else’s. Perhaps I am wrong, but that’s in all the copybooks.” “You want to make me believe,” said Rosalind, with passion, “that I am nobody’s child, that I have no right to love or any home in all the world!” “My dear! this is madness, Rose. There is your father: and I hope even I count for something; you are the only child I shall ever love. And your aunt Sophy, for whom, in fact, I am pleading, gives you a sort of adoration.” She got up hastily out of the great gloomy house of a chair and came into the dim centre of light in which he stood, and clasped his arm with her hands. “Uncle John,” she said, speaking very fast and almost inarticulately, “I am very fond of you. You have always been so good and kind; but I am her, and she is me. Don’t you understand? I have always been with her since I was a child. Nobody but me has seen her cry and break down. I know her all through and through. I think her thoughts, not my own. There are no secrets between us. She does not require even to speak, I know what she means without that. There are no secrets between her and me--” “No secrets,” he said; “no secrets! Rosalind, are you so very sure of that--now?” Her hands dropped from his arm: she went back and hid herself, as if trying to escape from him and herself in the depths of the great chair; and then there burst from her bosom, in spite of her, a sob--suppressed, restrained, yet irrestrainable--the heaving of a bosom filled to overflowing with unaccustomed misery and pain.