"Well, if you like poking out your eyes with the gas in the coffee- room, I have no objection, since you are too proud to go to bed. Wish him good night first, and do it naturally." "Nature would be thrown away on him, poor fellow," said Terry, as he roused Frank with difficulty to have 'Good night' roared into his ear, and give a listless hand. He was about to deal with Rosamond in the same way, but she said-- "No, I am not going yet," and settled herself opposite to him, with her half-knitted baby's shoe in her hands, and her feet on the fender, her crape drawn up from the fire, disposed for conversation. Frank, on the other hand, fell back into the old position, looking so wretched that she could bear it no longer, picked up the tube, forced it on him, and said, "Do tell me, dear Frank. You used to tell me long ago." He shook his head. "That's all over. You are very good, Rosamond, but you should not have forced her to come to me." "Not!" "My life was not worth saving." "She has not gone back from you again?--the horrible girl!" (this last aside). "It is not that she has gone back. She has never changed. It is I who have forfeited her." "You!--You!--She has not cast you off?" "You know how it was, and the resolution by which she had bound herself, and how I was maddened." "That! I thought it was all forgiven and forgotten!" cried Rosamond. "It is not a matter of forgiveness. She put it to me whether it was possible to begin on a broken word." "Worse and worse! Why, when you've spoken a foolish word, it is the foolishest thing in the world to hold to it." "If it were a foolish word!" said poor Frank. "I think I could have atoned for that day, if she could have tried me; but when she left me to judge, and those eyes of sweet, sorrowful--" "Sweet! Sorrowful, indeed! About as sweet and sorrowful as the butcher to the lamb. Left you to judge! A refinement of cruelty! She had better have stayed away when I told her it was the only chance to save your life." "Would that she had!" sighed Frank. "But that was your doing, Rosamond, and what she did in mere humanity can't be cast back again to bind her against her conscience." "Plague on her conscience!" was my Lady's imprecation. "I wonder if it is all coquetry!" "She deserves no blame," said Frank, understanding the manner, though the words were under Rosamond's breath. "Her very troubles in her own family have been the cause of her erecting a standard of what alone she could trust. Once in better days she fancied I came up to it, and when I know how far I have fallen short of it--" "Nonsense. She had no business to make the condition without warning you." "She knows more of me than only that," muttered poor Frank. "I was an ass in town last summer. It was the hope of seeing her that drew me; but if I had kept out of that set, all this would never have been." "It was all for her sake." (A substratum of 'Ungrateful, ungenerous girl.')