Rising with a sudden impulse, she went to the little glass, pushed back the tumbled hair from her tear-swollen face, and sternly took herself to task. “I’m ashamed of you, I am indeed, that after you have been taken into this home, and cared for, you should be so ungrateful as to make every one in it uncomfortable now, because you happen to be in trouble; and should have shown yourself as disagreeable, and selfish, and thoughtless as you have. Not one of them would have done so, you may be sure; and if you ever expect to grow into a woman that people will respect and love as they do Grandmother Sweet, or Mrs. Blossom, or Miss Silence, or Mrs. Patience, you _must_ learn to control yourself. And now, to begin, you must brush your hair, bathe your eyes, go downstairs and do as you ought to do. I know it will be pretty hard, but you _must_ do it.” It was hard. With a morbid self-consciousness that every one could not but know of her trouble she had hidden, shrinking from the village folk who so often came in; she was so weak that as she crossed the room she had to put her hand against the wall to steady her steps; and now that she was making the effort to rouse herself she began to see the luxury it had been to be perfectly wretched. But Rose resisted the temptation to throw herself again on the bed; she crept steadily, if somewhat weakly, downstairs, and made a brave attempt at smiling. With a guilty sense of all the opportunities for making herself useful she had neglected, she took up a stitch in her knitting Grandmother Sweet had dropped; overcast some velvet for Mrs. Patience, who was in a hurry with a bonnet; and that done helped Miss Silence set the table and make supper ready. They all saw the struggle Rose was making and helped her by keeping her mind as much as possible off from herself. And though that missing money still hung its dark shadow over her, and she started at every step outside with the sinking fear that it might be some one coming to arrest her, when she went to her room that night Grandmother Sweet patted her cheek as she kissed her good-night and whispered, “Thee has done bravely, Rose,” an unspoken approval she read in the manner of the others. More than that, she was surprised to find her heart lighter than she would have thought possible a few hours before. To keep steadily on in the way she had marked out for herself was anything but easy during those days of suspense and anxiety. To hold back the lump that was always threatening to rise in her throat, the tears from springing to her eyes; to keep a cheerful face when her heart would be sinking down, down; to feel an interest in the concerns of others when her own seemed to swallow up everything else. But it was her first step in a habit of conscious self-discipline that she never forgot, and that helped her to meet many an after hour of trial.