'Don't blame him!' said Rose, crouching down before the fire, while Catherine fell into the armchair again. 'It doesn't seem to count, from you—you have always been so ready to blame him!'
Her brow contracted; she looked frowning into the fire, her still colourless mouth working painfully.
Catherine was cut to the heart. 'Oh, Rose!' she said, holding out her hands, 'I will blame no one, dear. I seem hard—but I love you so. Oh, tell me—you would have told me everything once!'
There was the most painful yearning in her tone. Rose lifted a listless right hand and put it into her sister's outstretched palms. But she made no answer, till suddenly, with a smothered cry, she fell towards Catherine.
'Catherine! I cannot bear it. I said I loved him—he kissed me—I could kill myself and him.'
Catherine never forgot the mingled tragedy and domesticity of the hour that followed—the little familiar morning sounds in and about the house, maids running up and down stairs, tradesmen calling, bells ringing,—and here, at her feet, a spectacle of moral and mental struggle which she only half understood, but which wrung her inmost heart. Two strains of feeling seemed to be present in Rose—a sense of shock, of wounded pride, of intolerable humiliation, and a strange intervening passion of pity, not for herself but for Langham, which seemed to have been stirred in her by his letter. But though the elder questioned, and the younger seemed to answer, Catherine could hardly piece the story together, nor could she find the answer to the question filling her own indignant heart, 'Does she love him?'
At last Rose got up from her crouching position by the fire and stood, a white ghost of herself, pushing back the bright encroaching hair from eyes that were dry and feverish.
'If I could only be angry—downright angry,' she said, more to herself than Catherine, 'it would do one good.'
'Give others leave to be angry for you!' cried Catherine.