We will make no mystery about it.  I would I could.  Those happy tales of mystery are as much my envy as the popular narratives of the deeds of bread and cheese people, for they both create a tide-way in the attentive mind; the mysterious pricking our credulous flesh to creep, the familiar urging our obese imagination to constitutional exercise.  And oh, the refreshment there is in dealing with characters either contemptibly beneath us or supernaturally above!  My way is like a Rhone island in the summer drought, stony, unattractive and difficult between the two forceful streams of the unreal and the over-real, which delight mankind—­honour to the conjurors!  My people conquer nothing, win none; they are actual, yet uncommon.  It is the clock-work of the brain that they are directed to set in motion, and—­poor troop of actors to vacant benches!—­the conscience residing in thoughtfulness which they would appeal to; and if you are there impervious to them, we are lost:  back I go to my wilderness, where, as you perceive, I have contracted the habit of listening to my own voice more than is good:  The burden of a child in her bosom had come upon Rosamund with the visage of the Angel of Death fronting her in her path.  She believed that she would die; but like much that we call belief, there was a kernel of doubt in it, which was lively when her frame was enlivened, and she then thought of the giving birth to this unloved child, which was to disinherit the man she loved, in whose interest solely (so she could presume to think, because it had been her motive reason) she had married the earl.  She had no wish to be a mother; but that prospect, and the dread attaching to it at her time of life, she could have submitted to for Lord Romfrey’s sake.  It struck her like a scoffer’s blow that she, the one woman on earth loving Nevil, should have become the instrument for dispossessing him.  The revulsion of her feelings enlightened her so far as to suggest, without enabling her to fathom him, that instead of having cleverly swayed Lord Romfrey, she had been his dupe, or a blind accomplice; and though she was too humane a woman to think of punishing him, she had so much to forgive that the trifles daily and at any instant added to the load, flushed her resentment, like fresh lights showing new features and gigantic outlines.  Nevil’s loss of Cecilia she had anticipated; she had heard of it when she was lying in physical and mental apathy at Steynham.  Lord Romfrey had repeated to her the nature of his replies to the searching parental questions of Colonel Halkett, and having foreseen it all, and what was more, foretold it, she was not aroused from her torpor.  Latterly, with the return of her natural strength, she had shown herself incapable of hearing her husband speak of Nevil; nor was the earl tardy in taking the hint to spare the mother of his child allusions that vexed her.  Now and then they occurred perforce.  The presence of Cecilia exasperated Rosamund’s peculiar sensitiveness.