Ferdinand, now Lord Laxley, understood the merits of his finger-nails better than the nature of young women; but he is not to be blamed for presuming that Rose had learnt to adore him.  Else why did she like his company so much?  He was not mistaken in thinking she looked up to him.  She seemed to beg to be taken into his noble serenity.  In truth she sighed to feel as he did, above everybody!—­she that had fallen so low!  Above everybody!—­born above them, and therefore superior by grace divine!  To this Rose Jocelyn had come—­she envied the mind of Ferdinand.

He, you may be sure, was quite prepared to accept her homage.  Rose he had always known to be just the girl for him; spirited, fresh, and with fine teeth; and once tied to you safe to be staunch.  They walked together, rode together, danced together.  Her soft humility touched him to eloquence.  Say she was a little hypocrite, if you like, when the blood came to her cheeks under his eyes.  Say she was a heartless minx for allowing it to be bruited that she and Ferdinand were betrothed.  I can but tell you that her blushes were blushes of gratitude to one who could devote his time to such a disgraced silly creature, and that she, in her abject state, felt a secret pleasure in the protection Ferdinand’s name appeared to extend over her, and was hardly willing to lose it.

So far Lady Elburne’s tact and discipline had been highly successful.  One morning, in May, Ferdinand, strolling with Rose down the garden made a positive appeal to her common sense and friendly feeling; by which she understood that he wanted her consent to his marriage with her.

Rose answered: 

‘Who would have me?’

Ferdinand spoke pretty well, and ultimately got possession of her hand.  She let him keep it, thinking him noble for forgetting that another had pressed it before him.

Some minutes later the letters were delivered.  One of them contained Juliana’s dark-winged missive.

‘Poor, poor Juley!’ said Rose, dropping her head, after reading all that was on the crumpled leaf with an inflexible face.  And then, talking on, long low sighs lifted her bosom at intervals.  She gazed from time to time with a wistful conciliatory air on Ferdinand.  Rushing to her chamber, the first cry her soul framed was: 

‘He did not kiss me!’

The young have a superstitious sense of something incontestably true in the final protestations of the dead.  Evan guiltless! she could not quite take the meaning this revelation involved.  That which had been dead was beginning to move within her; but blindly:  and now it stirred and troubled; now sank.  Guiltless all she had thought him!  Oh! she knew she could not have been deceived.  But why, why had he hidden his sacrifice from her?

‘It is better for us both, of course,’ said Rose, speaking the world’s wisdom, parrot-like, and bursting into tears the next minute.  Guiltless, and gloriously guiltless! but nothing—­nothing to her!