The hysterical sobs were pumping up the tears now in hot torrents, and these Mrs. Sutton was fain to assuage by loving arts she would not—­but for the danger of allowing them to flow—­have been in the temper to employ, so full was her heart of yearning pity for the hardly-used babe, and displeasure at the mother’s weak selfishness.  It was easier to forgive and forget Rosa’s sins; to lessen, in the retrospect, her worst faults into foibles, than it would have been to overlook the more venal failings of one less mercurial, and whose personal fascinations did not equal hers.

Ere the close of another day, Mrs. Sutton had excused her unnatural insensibility to her child’s virtues and affection, by representing to herself how fearfully disease had warped judgment and perception; had cast over the enormities she could not palliate the pall of solemn remembrance of the truth that death’s dark door was already as surely shut between mother and daughter, as if the grave held the former.  A week of chill March rains and wind was disastrous to the patient, who had seemed to draw her main supplies of strength from the sunshine admitted freely to her room, with the spring air, redolent with the delicious odors of the freshly-turned earth, the budding trees, and early blossoms from the garden heneath her windows.  She shrank and shivered under the ungenial sky, while the drizzling mist soaked life and animation out of the fragile body.  Occasional fits of delirium, increased difficulty of breathing, and a steady decline of the slender remains of vital force, warned her attendants that their care would not be required much longer.  She was still obstinate in her disbelief of the grave nature of her malady.  The most distant reference to her decease would arouse her to angry refutation of the hinted doubt of her recovery, and excited her to offer proof of her declaration that she was less ill than others supposed; she would summon up a poor counterfeit of energy and mirth, more ghastly than her previous lassitude; deny that she suffered from any cause, save the unfailing nervous depression consequent upon the unfavorable weather.

Then came a day on which the sun looked forth with augmented splendor from his sombrely curtained pavilion; when the naked branches of the deciduous trees, the serried lances of the evergreens, and the broad leaves of the tent-like magnolias—­the pride of the Tazewell place—­shone as from a bath of molten silver.  The battered flowers ventured into later and healthier bloom, and a robin, swinging upon the lilac spray nearest Rosa’s window, sang blithe greeting to the reinstated spring.

Rosa heard him—­opened her eyes, and smiled.

“One—­maybe the very same—­used to sing there every morning when I was a girl—­used to awake me from my second nap.  I could sleep all night then, and never dream once!”

A messenger had been sent, at daybreak, for her sisters and brother, who resided several miles away, but as yet Mrs. Sutton and Frederic were her only nurses.  She had dozed almost constantly during the night, and been delirious when awakened to take nourishment or tonics, muttering senseless and disconnected words, and moaning in pain, the location and nature of which she could not describe to the solicitous watchers.