But it was in vain she gazed; nothing crossed the park except the sweep of the clouds driven along the sky; nothing sounded in the air except the wind, the trees, and sometimes the opening of a distant door or clap of a gate; until the dining-room became more audible, a sound of chairs pushed back and voices rising, warning the watcher. She flew like an arrow through the hall, and burst into the still sanctuary of domestic warmth and tranquillity as if she had been a hunted creature escaping from a fatal pursuit with her enemies at her heels. Her hands were like ice, her slight figure shivering with cold, yet her heart beating so that she could scarcely draw her breath. All this must disappear before the gentlemen came in. It was Rosalind’s first experience in that strange art which comes naturally to a woman, of obliterating herself and her own sensations; but how was she to still her pulse, to restore her color, to bring warmth to her chilled heart? She felt sure that her misery, her anguish of suspense, her appalling doubts and terrors, must be written in her face; but it was not so. The emergency brought back a rush of the warm blood tingling to her fingers’ ends. Oh never, never, through her, must the mother she loved be betrayed! That brave impulse brought color to her cheek and strength to her heart. She made one or two of those minute changes in the room which a woman always finds occasion for, drawing the card-table into a position more exactly like that which her father approved, giving an easier angle to his chair, with a touch moving that of Madam into position as if it had been risen from that moment. Then Rosalind took up the delicate work that lay on the table, and when the gentlemen entered was seated on a low seat within the circle of the shaded lamp, warm in the glow of the genial fireside, her pretty head bent a little over her pretty industry, her hands busy. She who had been the image of anxiety and unrest a moment before was now the culminating-point of all the soft domestic tranquillity, luxury, boundless content and peace, of which this silent room was the home. She looked up with a smile to greet them as they came in. The brave girl had recovered her sweet looks, her color, and air of youthful composure and self-possession, by sheer force of will, and strain of the crisis in which she stood to maintain the honor of the family at every hazard. She had been able to do that, but she could not yet for the moment trust herself to speak. CHAPTER II.