Next day, as they drove out in the usual afternoon hour while Mr. Trevanion took his nap after luncheon, a little incident happened which was nothing, yet gave Rosalind, who was alone with her stepmother in the carriage, a curious sensation. A little way out of the village, on the side of the road, she suddenly perceived a man standing, apparently waiting till they should pass. Madam had been very silent ever since they left home, so much more silent than it was her habit to be that Rosalind feared she had done something to incur Mrs. Trevanion’s displeasure. Instead of the animated conversations they used to have, and the close consultations that were habitual between them, they sat by each other silent, scarcely exchanging a word in a mile. Rosalind was not herself a great talker, but when she was with this other and better self, she flowed forth in lively observation and remark, which was not talk, but the involuntary natural utterance which came as easily as her breath. This day, however, she had very little to say, and Madam nothing. They leaned back, each in her corner, with a blank between them, which Rosalind now and then tried to break with a wistful question as to whether mamma was cold, whether she did not find the air too keen, if she would like the carriage closed, etc., receiving a smile and a brief reply, but no more. They had fallen into silence almost absolute as they passed through the village, and it was when they emerged once more into the still country road that the incident which has been referred to took place. Some time before they came up to him, Rosalind remarked the man standing under one of the hedgerow trees, close against it, looking towards them, as if waiting for the carriage to pass. Though she was not eager for the tales of the village like Sophy, Rosalind had a country girl’s easily roused curiosity in respect to a stranger. She knew at once by the outline of him, before she could make out even what class he belonged to, that this was some one she had never seen before. As the carriage approached rapidly she grew more and more certain. He was a young man, a gentleman—at least his dress and attitude were like those of a gentleman; he was slim and straight, not like the country louts. As he turned his head towards the carriage, Rosalind thought she had never seen a more remarkable face. He was very pale; his features were large and fine, and his pallor and thinness were made more conspicuous by a pair of very large, dreamy, uncertain dark eyes. These eyes were looking so intently towards the carriage that Rosalind had almost made up her mind that there was to be some demand upon their sympathy, some petition or appeal. She could not help being stirred with all the impetuosity of her nature, frank and warm-hearted and generous, towards this poor gentleman. He looked as if he had been ill, as if he meant to throw himself upon their bounty, as if— The horses sped on with easy speed as she sat up in the carriage and prepared herself for whatever might happen. It is needless to say that nothing happened as far as the bystander was concerned. He looked intently at them, but did no more. Rosalind was so absorbed in a newly awakened interest that she thought of nothing else, till suddenly, turning round to her companion, she met—not her stepmother’s sympathetic countenance, but the blackness of a veil in which Mrs. Trevanion had suddenly enveloped herself. “That must surely be the gentleman Sophy was talking of,” she said. Madam gave a slight shiver in her furs. “It is very cold,” she said; “it has grown much colder since we came out.”

“Shall I tell Robert to close the carriage, mother?”

“Oh, no, it is unnecessary. You can tell him to go home by the Wildwood gate. I should not have come out if I had known it was so cold.”

“I hope you have not taken cold, mamma. To me the air seems quite soft. I suppose,” Rosalind said, in that occasional obtuseness which belongs to innocence, “you did not notice, as you put down your veil just then, that gentleman on the road? I think he must be the gentleman Sophy talked about—very pale, with large eyes. I think he must have been ill. I feel quite interested in him too.”

“No, I did not observe—”

“I wish you had noticed him, mamma. I should know him again anywhere; it is quite a remarkable face. What can he want in the village? I think you should make the doctor call, or send papa’s card. If he should be ill—”

“Rosalind, you know how much I dislike village gossip. A stranger in the inn can be nothing to us. There is Dr. Smith if he wants anything,” said Madam, hurriedly, almost under her breath. And she shivered again, and drew her furred mantle more closely round her. Though it was November, the air was soft and scarcely cold at all, Rosalind thought in her young hardiness; but then Mrs. Trevanion, shut up so much in an overheated room, naturally was more sensitive to cold.

This was in the afternoon; and on the same evening there occurred the incident of the bramble, and all the misery that followed, concluding in Mr. Trevanion’s attack, and the sudden gloom and terror thrown upon the house. Rosalind had no recollection of so trifling a matter in the excitement and trouble that followed. She saw her stepmother again only in the gray of the winter morning, when waking suddenly, with that sense of some one watching her which penetrates the profoundest sleep, she found Mrs. Trevanion seated by her bedside, extremely pale, with dark lines under her eyes, and the air of exhaustion which is given by a sleepless night.

“I came to tell you, dear, that your father, at last, is getting a little sleep,” she said.

“Oh, mamma— But you have had no sleep—you have been up all night!”

“That does not much matter. I came to say also, Rosalind, that I fear my being so late last night and his impatience had a great deal to do with bringing on the attack. It might be almost considered my fault.”

“Oh, mamma! we all know,” cried Rosalind, inexpressibly touched by the air with which she spoke, “how much you have had to bear.”

“No more than what was my duty. A woman when she marries accepts all the results. She may not know what there will be to bear, but whatever it is it is all involved in the engagement. She has no right to shrink—”

There was a gravity, almost solemnity, in Madam’s voice and look which awed the girl. She seemed to be making a sort of formal and serious explanation. Rosalind had seen her give way under her husband’s cruelty and exactions. She had seen her throw herself upon the bed and weep, though there had never been a complaint in words to blame the father to the child. This was one point in which, and in which alone, the fact that Rosalind was his daughter, and not hers, had been apparent. Now there was no accusation, but something like a statement, formal and solemn, which was explained by the exhaustion and calm as of despair that was in her face.

“That has been my feeling all through,” she said. “I wish you to understand it, Rosalind. If Reginald were at home—well, he is a boy, and I could not explain to him as I can to you. I want you to understand me; I have had more to bear, a great deal more, than I expected. But I have always said to myself it was in the day’s work. You may perhaps be tempted to think, looking back, that I have had, even though he has been so dependent upon me, an irritating influence. Sometimes I have myself thought so, and that some one else— But if you will put one thing to another,” she added, going on in the passionless, melancholy argument, “you will perceive that the advantage to him of my knowledge of all his ways counter-balances any harm that might arise from that; and then there is always the doubt whether any one else would not have been equally irritating after a time.”

“Mother,” cried Rosalind, who had raised herself in her bed and was gazing anxiously into the pale and worn-out face which was turned half away from her, not looking at her; “mother! why do you say all this to me? Do I want you to explain yourself, I who know that you have been the best, the kindest—”

Mrs. Trevanion did not look at her, but put up her hand to stop this interruption.

“I am saying this because I think your father is very ill, Rosalind.”

“Worse, mamma?”

“I have myself thought that he was growing much weaker. We flattered ourselves, you know, that to be so long without an attack was a great gain; but I have felt he was growing weaker, and I see now that Dr. Beaton agrees with me. And to have been the means of bringing on this seizure when he was so little able to bear it—”

“Oh, mamma! how can you suppose that any one would ever blame—”

“I am my own judge, Rosalind. No, you would not blame me, not now at least, when you are entirely under my influence. I think, however, that had it not been this it would have been something else. Any trifling matter would have been enough. Nothing that we could have done would have staved it off much longer. That is my conviction. I have worked out the question, oh, a hundred times within myself. Would it be better to go away, and acknowledge that I could not— I was doing as much harm as good—”

Rosalind here seized upon Mrs. Trevanion’s arm, clasping it with her hands, with a cry of “Go away! leave us, mother!” in absolute astonishment and dismay.

“And so withdraw the irritation. But then with the irritation I should have deprived him of a great deal of help. And there was always the certainty that no other could do so much, and that any other would soon become an irritation too. I have argued the whole thing out again and again. And I think I am right, Rosalind. No one else could have been at his disposal night and day like his wife. And if no one but his wife could have annoyed him so much, the one must be taken with the other.”

“You frighten me, mamma; is it so very serious? And you have done nothing—nothing?”

Here Mrs. Trevanion for the first time turned and looked into Rosalind’s face.

“Yes,” she said. There was a faint smile upon her lips, so faint that it deepened rather than lightened the gravity of her look. She shook her head and looked tenderly at Rosalind with this smile. “Ah, my dear,” she said, “you would willingly make the best of it; but I have done something. Not, indeed, what he thinks, what perhaps other people think, but something I ought not to have done.” A deep sigh followed, a long breath drawn from the inmost recesses of her breast to relieve some pain or pressure there. “Something,” she continued, “that I cannot help, that, alas! I don’t want to do; although I think it is my duty, too.”

And then she was silent, sitting absorbed in her own thoughts by Rosalind’s bed. The chilly winter morning had come in fully as she talked till now the room was full of cold daylight, ungenial, unkindly, with no pleasure in it. Rosalind in her eager youth, impatient of trouble, and feeling that something must be done or said to make an end of all misery, that it was not possible there could be no remedy, held her mother’s hand between hers, and cried and kissed it and asked a hundred questions. But Madam sat scarcely moving, her mind absorbed in a labyrinth from which she saw no way of escape. There seemed no remedy either for the ills that were apparent or those which nobody knew.

“You ought at least to be resting,” the girl said at last; “you ought to get a little sleep. I will get up and go to his room and bring you word if he stirs.”

“He will not stir for some time. No, I am not going to bed. After I have bathed my face Jane will get me a cup of tea, and I shall go down again. No, I could not sleep. I am better within call, so that if he wants me— But I could not resist the temptation of coming in to speak to you, Rosalind. I don’t know why—just an impulse. We ought not to do things by impulse, you know, but alas! some of us always do. You will remember, however, if necessary. Somehow,” she said, with a pathetic smile, her lips quivering as she turned to the girl’s eager embrace, “you seem more my own child, Rosalind, more my champion, my defender, than those who are more mine.”

“Nothing can be more yours, mother, all the more that we chose each other. We were not merely compelled to be mother and child.”

“Perhaps there is something in that,” said Mrs. Trevanion.

“And the others are so young; only I of all your children am old enough to understand you,” cried Rosalind, throwing herself into her stepmother’s arms. They held each other for a moment closely in that embrace which is above words, which is the supreme expression of human emotion and sympathy, resorted to when all words fail, and yet which explains nothing, which leaves the one as far as ever from understanding the other, from divining what is behind the veil of individuality which separates husband from wife and mother from child. Then Mrs. Trevanion rose and put Rosalind softly back upon her pillow and covered her up with maternal care as if she had been a child. “I must not have you catch cold,” she said, with a smile which was her usual motherly smile with no deeper meaning in it. “Now go to sleep, my love, for another hour.”

In her own room Madam exchanged a few words with Jane, who had also been up all night, and who was waiting for her with the tea which is a tired watcher’s solace. “You must do all for me to-day, Jane,” she said; “I cannot leave Mr. Trevanion; I will not, which is more. I have been, alas! partly the means of bringing on this attack.”

“Oh, Madam, how many attacks have there been before without any cause!”

“That is a little consolation to me; still, it is my fault. Tell him how unsafe it is to be here, how curious the village people are, and that I implore him, for my sake, if he thinks anything of that, and for God’s sake, to go away. What can we do more? Tell him what we have both told him a hundred times, Jane!”

“I will do what I can, Madam; but he pays no attention to me, as you know.”

“Nor to any one,” said Madam, with a sigh. “I have thought sometimes of telling Dr. Beaton everything; he is a kind man, he would know how to forgive. But, alas! how could I tell if it would do good or harm?”

“Harm! only harm! He would never endure it,” the other said.

Again Mrs. Trevanion sighed; how deep, deep down was the oppression which those long breaths attempted to relieve. “Oh,” she said, “how happy they are that never stray beyond the limits of nature! Would not poverty, hard work, any privation, have been better for all of us?”

“Sixteen years ago, Madam,” Jane said.