Slowly the hours of night wore away, and as the moon rose higher and higher in the heavens, her rays fell upon the bowed form of Rosa, who, with clasped hands and bloodless cheeks, sat just where first we saw her—praying—weeping—thinking, and praying again, until at last there came over her troubled spirit, a calm, which ere long, resolved itself into a fixed determination. “She would tell him all—how she loved Richard Delafield, and how, though that love were hopeless, she could not call another her husband.” And he would release her—she knew he would. “But if he should not?” seemed whispered in her ear. For an instant her heart stood still, and then she answered aloud, “I will not do this great wickedness and sin against both God and man.” It was strange how calm this resolution made her. Rising up from the crouching posture she had assumed in the first abandonment of her grief, she walked to the open window, where she stood gazing out upon the starry sky, until at last, sick and faint with the sweet perfume of the night air, she turned away, and shuddering, she knew not why, sought her pillow. It was now the first of June, and in that southern clime the air was already hot, sultry, and laden with disease. For two weeks a fearful epidemic, whose nature the oldest physicians did not understand, had been raging in the towns adjoining, and many who in the morning rose up full of life and vigor, were in the evening no longer numbered among the living, so rapid was the work of death. In great alarm the terrified inhabitants had fled from place to place, but the destroyer was on their tract and the “brain fever,” as it was termed, claimed them for its victims.