say that word. I had known it and uttered
it m my heart, long, long before. I knew
you must love me by the strength of my own
love. I knew we were one. Heaven made us
so.—Yet you would part us! You could
bear to do it!"

"I could bear to do it," Leonard repeated
slowly, looking at her, "because we are one."

She stretched out her arms in a sort of
helpless, passionate appeal. Her hand touched
the crimson rose, smiling in gorgeous fulness
and completeness from its crystal vase. She
looked at it for a minute,then—her face changed.
The dilated eyes softened, the fiery spot faded
from her cheek. The frantic passion was
dying out. The first instinct of rebellion
was yielding to the truer, purer, woman-
nature. She bent her head down into her
hands.

"We were so happy, so happy. God pity
us!" she said; and the tears came plenteously
and tenderly. And Leonard, in his soul, cried
"God help us, strengthen us!" For he needed
both help and strength. In a little while she
knelt closely beside him, her head leaning
on his breast, weeping out the passion that
had burned so fiercely as to convulse the
delicate frame wherein it flamed. Presently
when Leonard spoke, his low voice seemed
gradually to still the sobs. She looked up—
with the old sweet look, that for him her face
had always worn. It almost struck down
his courage to see it. With a flash came
the thought of the coming life—life without
her. What that meant to him, only his
own heart could tell. For a brief space he
wrestled with that heart. It was mutinous, it
resisted the crushing fate that loomed heavy
and dark before it. All the strong passion
of his man's nature roused itself, and rebelled
against the suffering. It fought fiercely, it
struggled with desperate strength. It cried
out against the weary years;  the desolate
cruel time that was coming. How often do
we recoil thus from the time that is coming.
Why do we not remember that we live in
eternity, and so,—be patient ?

Some such thought came to Leonard, and
helped to still the tumult. And Rosamond
did not guess what had passed during those
moments that he remained so still,—shading
his face with his hand. She did not know all
the meaning of the uplifted look with which
he turned to her again. And he only said,

"Rosamond, my Rosamond! We will
have courage." Then they heard the children
calling them.

"I will not go back, in there," Rosamond
said faintly. She laid her hand on the side-
door that led into the corridor. But suddenly,
she remembered—what it would be when next
she saw him, and she shrunk back with a low
cry.

He bent over her. He folded her in his
arms. As a mother that yearns to her
child, with a tenderness as pure, a sorrow as
sacred, Leonard held his betrothed closely
strained to his heart. Again he said, and
with a kind of stern resolve, as to himself:—

"We will have courage!"

Then he let her go.

CHAPTER THE SIXTH.

Two months more, and Leonard Ross was
on his way to India. He only waited for his
sister's marriage. Then he went. There is
little need to relate the history of those two
months. For Rosamond they held much strife,
struggle, and passionate but impotent resistance.
It was Leonard who had to teach her
what he, alas! needed all his strength of
manhood to recognise with submission; that in
patience and power of endurance lay their
hope, and not in rebellious strivings against
the inevitable. That it was inevitable they
both felt, Leonard from the first, and
Rosamond later: there was no possibility of
tampering with the circumstances before
them, unless by a dereliction from that
straight path of truth and honour which had
ever been the roadway of Leonard's life.

So, they parted. Parted, knowing in how
full, and deep, and wide a sense of parting.
Agnes, married to her sailor-lover would be
wandering about the world for years to come,
—that link of possible communication was
broken. And Mr. Bellew in the midst of
his bland courtesy, contrived to take his
measures decisively and surely. Very soon
after the disclosure of what he called "the
truly extraordinary circumstances of the
case," he removed his household to an estate
of his in Cornwall. He laid down no stringent
rules, he impressed no stern commands; but
with the quiet, cruel, cold shrewdness which
ever went hand in hand with his indomitable
will, he ensured the absolute and entire
cessation of all intercourse between his
daughter and her lover. Rosamond, high-
spirited and resolute as she was, could not
combat with the experienced and gentlemanly
scheming that her father employed when he
chose. Leonard was almost equally at fault; for,
though he knew the character he had to cope
with, it was only with the theoretical knowledge
that the penetration of a good man has
into the natureof a worldly and designing one.

Mr. Bellew gained credit for much magnanimity
in permitting Leonard to write once,
once only, before he left England. The letter
was written, but it never reached her.
She saw that the ship had sailed in which she
knew he was to go. She even heard of his
embarkation from poor Agnes, bridal Agnes;
torn between conflicting joy and grief, the
union with her lover, and the parting with
her brother.

After that, a blank. The grave itself, it
seemed, could not have divided them more
surely.

In the solitude of the wild sea-shore, with
her little sisters for her companions, Rosamond
learned acquaintance with the face of
her sorrow. There the quiet capacity to