This news, so amazing and so unprecedented, had been synchronous with the judge’s breakdown and had, Mrs. Allestree believed, contributed to it. The sudden relief had snapped the strain on his nerves, and he slipped down into a state of coma. However, she did not tell Rose this, nor her suspicions, which were fast becoming certainties, about the mortgage; she only kissed her affectionately and made her sing to her the song which had won such an ovation from the French critics, and which Cousin Emily Carter had described with enthusiasm before she departed to the Tidewater region, where she hoped to cut her own asparagus bed and set out her flowers undisturbed by Parisian manners and customs. Allestree welcomed Rose with even greater relief than his mother and the judge, but wisdom had taught him to rejoice in silence, and he did so, being careful, however, to send promptly for her portrait which, according to the agreement between Mrs. Allestree and the judge, could not be loaned during Rose’s presence in the house, but only as a consolation in her absence. But the judge sighed deeply when they told him it had been returned to the studio again. It was during the first days of her father’s convalescence that Rose found Margaret’s letter to her among his papers; not knowing Rose’s address in Paris, Margaret had sent it in the judge’s care and he had overlooked it when he forwarded the letters, as he did, once a week. By a strange accident it had slipped under some pamphlets in the basket on his library table and lay there until Rose, rearranging his papers one morning, came upon it and recognizing the writing broke the seal with some trepidation, for Margaret had never been an intimate correspondent, and Rose divined some serious reason for this long closely written letter. She was alone when she found it, and she went to the open window and stood there reading it. Margaret, moved by the deep sorrow and passion which had swept over her poor troubled soul in those last days of her life, had poured out her heart. She told Rose all; that she had come between her and Fox; in her wild and covetous jealousy she had thought to wrest happiness from despair; to keep his love she had been willing to lose all, and she had lost! She concealed nothing, the last pitiful words of the letter, a remarkable letter of passion and grief and self-sacrifice, told Rose that she was going to give up her life to her children and try to live down her desertion of them.