Rose, after Sylvia went down-stairs, had put out her light and sat down beside the window gazing out into the night.  She still wore her jewels.  She could not bear to take them off.  It was a beautiful night.  The day had been rather warm, but the night was one of coolness and peace.  The moon was just rising.  Rose could see it through the leafy branches of an opposite elm-tree.  It seemed to be caught in the green foliage.  New shadows were leaping out of the distance as the moon increased.  The whole landscape was dotted with white luminosities which it was bliss not to explain, just to leave mysteries.  Wonderful sweetnesses and fresh scents of growing things, dew-wet, came in her face.

Rose was very happy.  Only an hour before she had been miserable, and now her whole spirit had leaped above her woe as with the impetus of some celestial fluid rarer than all the miseries of earth and of a necessity surmounting them.  She looked out at the night, and it was to her as if that and the whole world was her jewel-casket, and the jewels therein were immortal, and infinite in possibilities of giving and receiving glory and joy.  Rose thought of Horace, and a delicious thrill went over her whole body.  Then she thought of Lucy Ayres, and felt both pity and a sort of angry and contemptuous repulsion.  “How a girl can do so!” she thought.

Intuitively she knew that what she felt for Horace was a far nobler love than Lucy’s.  “Love—­was it love, after all?” Rose did not know, but she gave her head a proud shake.  “I never would put him in such a position, and lie about him, just because—­” she said to herself.

She did not finish her sentence.  Rose was innately modest even as to her own self-disclosures.  Her emotions were so healthy that she had the power to keep them under the wings of her spirit, both to guard and hold the superior place.  She had a feeling that Lucy Ayres’s love for Horace was in a way an insult to him.  After what Sylvia had said, she had not a doubt as to the falsity of what Lucy had told her during their drive.  She and Lucy had been on the front seat of the carriage, when Lucy had intimated that there was an understanding between herself and Horace.  She had spoken very low, in French, and Rose had been obliged to ask her to repeat her words.  Immediately Lucy’s mother’s head was between the two girls, and the bunch of violets on her bonnet grazed Rose’s ear.

“What are you saying?” she had asked Lucy, sharply.  And Lucy had lied.  “I said what a pleasant day it is,” she replied.

“You said it in French.”

“Yes, mother.”

“Next time say it in English,” said Mrs. Ayres.

Of course, if Lucy had lied to her mother, she had lied to her.  She had lied in two languages.  “She must be a very strange girl,” thought Rose.  She resolved that she could not go to see Lucy very often, and a little pang of regret shot through her.  She had been very ready to love poor Lucy.