In the partial insanity of her woe and despair, she lifted her gray face and vacant eyes to the vast, empty vault, beyond which dwelt her Maker afar off, and said the words aloud—­spat them at Him through hard, ashy lips.

“I love him!  I love him!  You have taken him from me—­but I will love him for all that!”

Heaven—­or Fate—­her blasphemous mood did not distinguish the one from the other—­was a robber.  Her brother was pitiless as the death that would not answer to her call.  Between them she was bereaved.

It was but a touch—­the lightest breath of natural feeling that broke up the hot crust, that shut down the fountain of tears—­Rosa’s voice, tuneful and sad as a nightingale’s, chanting the border-lays she loved so well: 

    “When I gae out at e’en. 
     Or walk at morning air,
     Ilk rustling bush will seem to say
     I used to meet thee there. 
     Then I’ll sit down and cry,
     And live beneath the tree. 
     And when a leaf falls in my lap,
     I’ll oa’ it a word from thee.”

She had sung it herself to Frederic the night before he left her, and as she finished the artless ballad, he took her in his arms and kissed her.

As he would never do again!

“My darling! my darling!” she cried aloud.

Then the grief-drops came in a flood.

CHAPTER V.

Clean hands.

The servant who summoned Mabel to supper brought down word that she was not feeling well, and did not wish any.

“Not well!  Bless me!” exclaimed Mrs. Sutton, starting up.  “Rosa, love, excuse me for three seconds, please.  I must see what is the matter.  I do hope there is no bad news from—­” (arrested by the recollection that there were servants in the room, she substituted for the name upon her lips)—­“in her letters.”

“I don’t think she’s much sick ma’am,” said the maid.  “She is a-settin’ in the window.”

“Where I left her with her letters, an hour and more ago,” observed Rosa.  “Don’t hurry back if she needs you, Aunt Rachel.  I will make myself at home; shall not mind eating alone for once.”

Not withstanding the array of dainties before her, she only nibbled the edge of a cream biscuit with her little white teeth, and crumbled the rest of it upon her plate in listlessness or profound and active reverie, while the hostess was away.  She, too, had her conjectures and her anxieties—­a knotty problem to work out, and the longer she pondered the more confident was she that she had grasped at least one filament of the clue leading to elucidation.

Mabel had not stirred from her place—­sat yet with her brother’s letter in her lap, her hands lying heavily upon it, although her muslin dress was ghostly in the stream of moonlight flowing across the chamber.  She had wept her eyes dry, and her voice was monotonous, but unfaltering.