"I dare say it was. He was very fond of Adeline, and no doubt thought her marriage with a heretic would be perdition here and hereafter. I don't see that you can blame him: you would have done the same in his place, had you been true to your creed. Father Marc's one of the best gossipers living. We saw a great deal of him in Adeline's sick-room, after you left. I fell in love with the charming old père." Would she ever be serious! The question might have crossed Mr. St. John at a less bitter moment. "And I think his gossip did Adeline good," continued Rose. "It was a sort of break to her misery. How could you have doubted her--have doubted for a single moment, whatever your passionate rage might have been, that her whole love was yours?" How indeed? But perhaps in his inmost heart he never had doubted it. He sat there now, bearing the bitter weight of remembrance as he best might, his eyes looking back into the past, his delicate lips drawn in to pain. "They have no portrait of her," went on Rose, not in her mercilessness, but in her giddy, gossiping lightness. "And the one you took of her, you defaced." "Don't, Rose!" The words came from him with a wail. His remorse wanted no feeding; it was already as great as he well knew how to bear. Rose was not quite without feeling, and the words and their tone checked her. She sat thinking how unkind she had been, and began flirting the strings of her bonnet about, as it lay near her on the table. But it was not in her nature to remain silent long. Something, perhaps the black ribbon, took her thoughts to another subject: and in truth she did not like to say more of Adeline. "Does it not seem like a fatality? All three of them to have died, one after the other!" Mr. St. John came slowly out of his pain, and looked at her for an explanation. "Three of whom?" "Oh, I was thinking of Alnwick. Mr. Carleton St. John first and then his two boys. I suppose you have inherited?" "My brother has. Yes, it is a very sad thing. Quite a fatality, as you say." "What fortune has Charlotte now? Much?" "I really do not know. I fear not much." "She reckoned so surely--I know she did--upon being Lady St. John!" "That seems to be a chief portion of life's business, I think," he remarked: "the reckoning upon things that never come to pass." "I suppose you have not seen her since?" "Mrs. Carleton St. John? Yes, I have. I heard she was staying with Mrs. Darling in town, the week I spent there before Christmas, and I called." "How was she looking? How did she seem?" asked Rose, rather eagerly. "She seemed quite well, and she looked well. Very thin: but in good health and spirits." "There was no--excitement in her manner, was there?" "On the contrary. She struck me as being one of the calmest, quietest-mannered women I ever saw." "Did you think her pretty?" "No. I thought her handsome." "What did mamma say to you about me?--and Margaret and Mary Anne? No good, I know. They are always abusing me."