“I am my own judge, Rosalind. No, you would not blame me, not now at least, when you are entirely under my influence. I think, however, that had it not been this it would have been something else. Any trifling matter would have been enough. Nothing that we could have done would have staved it off much longer. That is my conviction. I have worked out the question, oh, a hundred times within myself. Would it be better to go away, and acknowledge that I could not-- I was doing as much harm as good--” Rosalind here seized upon Mrs. Trevanion’s arm, clasping it with her hands, with a cry of “Go away! leave us, mother!” in absolute astonishment and dismay. “And so withdraw the irritation. But then with the irritation I should have deprived him of a great deal of help. And there was always the certainty that no other could do so much, and that any other would soon become an irritation too. I have argued the whole thing out again and again. And I think I am right, Rosalind. No one else could have been at his disposal night and day like his wife. And if no one but his wife could have annoyed him so much, the one must be taken with the other.” “You frighten me, mamma; is it so very serious? And you have done nothing--nothing?” Here Mrs. Trevanion for the first time turned and looked into Rosalind’s face. “Yes,” she said. There was a faint smile upon her lips, so faint that it deepened rather than lightened the gravity of her look. She shook her head and looked tenderly at Rosalind with this smile. “Ah, my dear,” she said, “you would willingly make the best of it; but I have done something. Not, indeed, what he thinks, what perhaps other people think, but something I ought not to have done.” A deep sigh followed, a long breath drawn from the inmost recesses of her breast to relieve some pain or pressure there. “Something,” she continued, “that I cannot help, that, alas! I don’t want to do; although I think it is my duty, too.” And then she was silent, sitting absorbed in her own thoughts by Rosalind’s bed. The chilly winter morning had come in fully as she talked till now the room was full of cold daylight, ungenial, unkindly, with no pleasure in it. Rosalind in her eager youth, impatient of trouble, and feeling that something must be done or said to make an end of all misery, that it was not possible there could be no remedy, held her mother’s hand between hers, and cried and kissed it and asked a hundred questions. But Madam sat scarcely moving, her mind absorbed in a labyrinth from which she saw no way of escape. There seemed no remedy either for the ills that were apparent or those which nobody knew. “You ought at least to be resting,” the girl said at last; “you ought to get a little sleep. I will get up and go to his room and bring you word if he stirs.”