"Mother! for God's sake, what is it! what has changed you so?"
"That's right! say 'mother.' If she does come, she can't stop when she hears you call me 'mother,' when she sees us together at last, loving and knowing each other in spite of her. Oh, my kind, tender, pitying child! if you can only deliver me from her, how long may I live yet!—how happy we may both be!"
"Don't talk so! don't look so! Tell me quietly—dear, dear mother, tell me quietly—"
"Hush! hush! I am going to tell you. She threatened me on her death-bed, if I thwarted her—she said she would come to me from the other world. Rosamond! I have thwarted her and she has kept her promise—all my life since, she has kept her promise! Look! Down there!"
Her left arm was still clasped round Rosamond's neck. She stretched her right arm out toward the far corner of the room, and shook her hand slowly at the empty air.
"Look!" she said. "There she is as she always comes to me at the close of day—with the coarse, black dress on, that my guilty hands made for her—with the smile that there was on her face when she asked me if she looked like a servant. Mistress! mistress! Oh, rest at last! the Secret is ours no longer! Rest at last! my child is my own again! Rest, at last; and come between us no more!"
She ceased, panting for breath; and laid her hot, throbbing cheek against the cheek of her daughter. "Call me 'mother' again!" she whispered. "Say it loud; and send her away from me forever!"
Rosamond mastered the terror that shook her in every limb, and pronounced the word.
Her mother leaned forward a little, still gasping heavily for breath, and looked with straining eyes into the quiet twilight dimness at the lower end of the room.
"Gone!!!" she cried suddenly, with a scream of exultation. "Oh, merciful, merciful God! gone at last!"