He had feared once, only once, that she would forget the righteous necessities of her secret, and admit another, with cruel penitence, to its miserable pale.

It was on her first entry to the room where the body was lying, the earl sitting by it, his face almost as gray and sharp as that of the dead. One of his hands was on his son’s, the other crept presently to Rosamond’s golden hair. She had dropped on her knees beside the bed, her eyes buried in the coverlet, her arms flung out across it, moaning an inarticulate torrent of useless tenderness, and penitence, and despair. Her head was shaken by its sorrow like a yellow leaf, but the old man’s grief ran silently, as a stream that dries upon its stones.

That was the one occasion when South had distrusted the charity and shrewdness of her discretion; after that his doubts were at rest. She was everything a woman could be who would not sink her duties in sorrow, and South often wondered what the earl would have done without her.

He had beside ample reason for surprise. Her delicate little performance as a woman of affairs for the benefit of the lawyers, her equally fine and far more difficult personation before the family as lady paramount, were revelations of an ability he had been indisposed to admit.

He called it mummery to himself, but there was a dreary earnestness and effort in it which gave his slight the lie. He would not see the whiteness of her face, or the sorrow in her clouded eyes; and for a curious reason, because her grief left him, and it seemed with deliberate intention, in the cold.

She bore it with a certain stiffness of control as a burden she was too proud to share, yet which bent her into measured steps.

But South, who felt himself almost an accessory to her fate, could better have endured complaint; he would sooner have been hated, so he told himself.

So, since that memorable morning when she had flung a crumb of toast across the table at the gravity on his face, gray as it was with its news, and, afterward, in anguish and self-contempt, laid her sobbing head among the breakfast things, South had doubted everything about her but her charm.

Yet her sorrow proved, as he was finally to discover, exceedingly sincere; it outlasted even his demands upon it; but it lived, as all her clouds, in a windy sky; and broke, and blew over.