Rose read it through to the end, and then covered her face with her hands, trying to shut out the terrifying picture that it had unconsciously drawn of a woman, desolate, shipwrecked, without hope in earth or heaven. The terrors which had possessed Margaret’s soul swept over hers. All that Mrs. Allestree had told her, and that Gerty, poor, voluble, good-hearted Gerty, had enlarged upon, filled out the scene. The lonely walk, the visit to the studio, the unfriended and miserable death; she did not know of those other scenes in the church and the curiosity-shop where Margaret had found her heart, but she did know of a strange girl who had brought a single white lily to lay in Margaret’s dead hand and gone away weeping bitterly. She had blamed poor Margaret, judged her; Rose felt it at that moment and accused herself of heartlessness; of Fox she dared not think. In the new light which this letter shed on the situation, she began to understand how cruelly he had been placed, and there, too, she had judged! Poor Rose,--her father had inculcated stern and simple lessons and she had tried, before all things, to be just; but to be judicious and calm and in love at the same time was an impossible combination. She dashed the tears from her eyes, and thrust Margaret’s letter into her pocket and went about her duties with the air of a soldier on guard, but her lip would quiver at intervals and she could not sing a note when the judge asked for one of the old ballads that he had loved as a boy, and Rose had learned, to please him. It was about this time that she began to wonder if the old house must go, or if her father had been able to meet all the payments due upon it. She dared not ask him, and he said nothing, but she noticed that now that he was able to be moved into the library every day and sometimes into the garden in the warm spring sunshine, that he sat for hours at a time in a brown study with a deep furrow between his brows, and constantly pushing back his hair from his forehead, as he did in moments of perplexity. She was afraid to speak, lest any mention of the trouble which had so beset him would bring back the fever and a relapse, so she had to content herself with hope and waited for some sign on his part. The old house had never seemed so dear; the mantling vines were full out in new foliage, birds were nested on the southern wall toward the garden, and the old garden-plot itself, so sheltered and secluded by the house and the high brick wall which shut out the street, was just coming into bloom. The roses she had set out the spring before were in bud, and the peonies were blooming. Rose looked about her with a sigh and forgot that she would, perhaps, be one day a great prima donna with the world at her feet. Such things do not always fill a woman’s heart.