“And will, whatever you may say,” cried the woman, under her breath; “and will, till I die, or till one of us--” “Go up-stairs,” said Rosalind, peremptorily, “at once! What have you to do here? I don’t think you are safe in the house. If I had the power I should send you away.” “Miss Rosalind, you are as cruel as-- You have no heart. Me, that nursed you, and watched over you--” “It is too terrible a price to pay,” cried the girl, stamping her foot on the floor. “Go! I will not have you here. If mamma finds you when she comes down-stairs--” The woman laughed. “She will ask what you are doing here, Miss Rosalind. It will not be only me she’ll fly out upon. What are you doing here? Who’s outside that interests you so? It interests us both, that’s the truth; only I am the one that knows the best.” Rosalind’s white figure flew across the faint light. She grasped the shoulder of the dark shadow, almost invisible in the gloom. “Go!” she cried in her ear, pushing Russell before her; the onslaught was so sudden and vehement that the woman yielded and disappeared reluctantly, gliding away by one of the passages that led to the other part of the house. The girl stood panting and excited in the brief sudden fury of her passion, a miserable sense of failing faith and inability to explain to herself the circumstances in which she was, heightening the fervor of her indignation. Were Russell’s suspicions true? Had she been in the right all along? Those who take persistently the worst view of human nature are, alas! so often in the right. And what is there more terrible than the passion of defence and apology for one whom the heart begins to doubt? The girl was young, and in her rage and pain could scarcely keep herself from those vehement tears which are the primitive attribute of passion. How calm she could have been had she been quite, quite sure! How she had laughed at Russell’s prejudices in the old days when all was well. She had even excused Russell, feeling that after all it was pretty of her nurse to return continually to the image of her first mistress--Rosalind’s own mother--and that in the uneducated mind the prepossession against a stepmother, the wrath with which the woman saw her own nursling supplanted, had a sort of feudal flavor which was rather agreeable than otherwise.