When she heard who had been named as the heiress, she laughed in incredulous joy. “The curse worked, it worked--only in one instance did it fail! And time may remedy that!” No one knew what she meant, but the truth was that Magdala had been bitterly chagrined over Laurie’s marriage to Lelia. The infant had been left in the woods to further Magdala’s scheme of revenge. She knew from the gossip of the servants at The Crags that the family had planned a match between Laurie and Lelia, expecting them to be endowed with the Willoughby fortune. In a spirit of bitter spite, to punish Colonel Ritchie’s brutality, she had left the infant Rosalind, hoping that Miss Willoughby might adopt it and give it her fortune. If it grew up as beautiful and charming as the mother and grandmother, she did not doubt but that it would supplant Lelia in Laurie’s heart. Magdala thought that the curse had worked out almost all she had wished; she did not realize that Lelia’s inherited ill temper had wrought out all her personal ill. CHAPTER XXXVII. SHE BETRAYED HERSELF. Rosalind knew, for Mrs. Goodwill gossiped to her about it, of the strange alienation of Laurie and his bride. A more ignoble nature might have triumphed in their pain, but to Rosalind it only brought more grief. Her unselfish love for Laurie demanded his happiness, rather than her own. And cruel and unworthy as she knew Lelia to be, she wished Laurie never to find it out, never to realize that he was held in bitter bondage to one he could not help but scorn. The loquacious nurse had many theories to advance as the cause of the alienation. Her favorite reason was that both were equally disappointed in losing the bulk of their relative’s fortune. Rosalind thought Laurie had too noble a nature for such petty spite. But she held her peace, and kept revolving in her mind plans for getting away from him whose presence brought such subtle pain and pleasure blended that she could scarcely bear it. She did not guess that through all his busy consultations with the lawyer Laurie had the same train of thought running through his mind. He must get away from association with Rosalind, or he could never turn his thoughts from her back to the wife to whom he owed his fealty. The day came when, as her guardian and administrator of his aunt’s estate, he had to ask her where she wished to live out her life, what plans she had made for present and future. Rosalind had planned it all out by then, and she answered simply: “I have been talking to Doctor White about my lingering nervousness and debility, and he agrees with me that I ought to take Mrs. Goodwill and go to some quiet spot by the seashore to rest and recuperate. After that I should like to travel with an elderly companion, and see the world.”