The bitterness of death seemed to have passed, except for the romance of devotion on Rosalind’s part, which he believed had faded in the other kind of romance more natural at her age. No one but himself had appeared to remember at all this catastrophe which rent life asunder. But now, when no one expected it, out of the clear sky came the explosions of the storm. He had decided too quickly that all was over. The peace had been but a pretence, and now the whole matter would have to be re-opened again. The cause of the sudden return of all minds to the great family disaster and misery seemed to him more than ever confused by this last event. The condition which had led to Amy’s last adventure seemed to make it more possible, notwithstanding Sophy’s supposed discovery, that the story of the apparition was an illusion throughout. The child, always a visionary child, must have had, in the unnatural and strained condition of her nerves and long repression of her feelings, a dream so vivid as, like that of last night, to take the aspect of reality; and Rosalind, full of sympathy, and with all her own keen recollections ready to be called forth at a touch, must have received the contagion from her little sister, and seen what Amy had so long imagined she saw. Perhaps, even, it was the same contagion, acting on a matter-of-fact temperament, which had induced Sophy to believe that she, too, had seen her mother, but in real flesh and blood. Of all the hypotheses that could be thought of this seemed to him the most impossible. He had examined all the hotel registers, and made anxious inquiries everywhere, without finding a trace of Mrs. Trevanion. She had not, so far as he was aware, renounced her own name. And, even had she done so, it was impossible that she could have been in the hotel without some one seeing her, without leaving some trace behind. Notwithstanding this certainty, John Trevanion, even while he repeated his conviction to himself, was making his way once more to the hotel to see whether, by any possibility, some light might still be thrown upon a subject which had become so urgent. Yet even that, though it was the first thing that presented itself to him, had become, in fact, a secondary matter. The real question in this, as in all difficulties, was what to do next. What could be done to unravel the fatal tangle? Now that he contemplated the matter from afar, it became to him all at once a thing intolerable--a thing that must no longer be allowed to exist. What was publicity, what was scandal, in comparison with this wreck of life? There must be means, he declared to himself, of setting an unrighteous will aside, whatever lawyers might say. His own passiveness seemed incredible to him, as well as the extraordinary composure with which everybody else had acquiesced, accepting the victim’s sacrifice. But that was over. Even though the present agitation should pass away, he vowed to himself that it should