I had better not talk of it, or I shall cry too;
and I want to have done with sorrow now."

While she spoke those words, while her
eyes were fixed with wistful eagerness on her
daughter's face, the old instinct of neatness
was still mechanically at work in her weak,
wasted fingers. Rosamond had tossed her
gloves from her on the bed but the minute
before; and already her mother had taken
them up, and was smoothing them out
carefully and folding them neatly together, all
the while she spoke.

"Call me 'mother' again," she said, as
Rosamond took the gloves from her and
thanked her with a kiss for folding them up.
"I have never heard you call me 'mother'
till now—never, never till now, from the day
when you were born!"

Rosamond checked the tears that were
rising in her eyes again, and repeated the
word.

"It is all the happiness I want, to lie here,
and look at you, and hear you say that! Is
there any other woman in the world, my love,
who has a face so beautiful and so kind as
yours?" She paused, and smiled faintly.

"I can't look at those sweet rosy lips now,"
she said, "without thinking how many kisses
they owe me!"

"If you had only let me pay the debt
before!" said Rosamond, taking her mother's
hand, as she was accustomed to take her
child's, and placing it on her neck. "If you
had only spoken the first time we met, when
you came to nurse me! How sorrowfully I
have thought of that since! Oh, mother,
did I distress you much, in my ignorance?
Did it make you cry when you thought of
me after that?"

"Distress me! All my distress, Rosamond,
has been of my own making, not of
yours. My kind, thoughtful love! you said,
'Don't be hard on her'—do you remember?
When I was being sent away, deservedly sent
away, dear, for frightening you, you said to
your husband, 'Don't be hard on her!' Only
five words—but, oh, what a comfort it was to
me, afterwards, to think that you had said
them! I did want to kiss you so, Rosamond,
when I was brushing your hair: I had
such a hard fight of it to keep from crying
out loud when I heard you, behind the bed-
curtains, wishing your little child good-night.
My heart was in my mouth, choking me all
that time. I took your part afterwards, when
I went back to my mistress—I wouldn't hear
her say a harsh word of you. I could have
looked a hundred mistresses in the face then,
and contradicted them all. Oh no, no, no!
you never distressed me. My worst grief
at going away was years and years before I came
to nurse you at West Winston. It was when
I left my place at Porthgenna; when I stole
into your nursery, on that dreadful morning,
and when I saw you with both your little
arms round my master's neck. The doll you
had taken to bed with you was in one of
your hands; and your head was resting on
the captain's bosorn—just as mine rests now
—oh, so happily, Rosamond!—on yours. I
heard the last words he was speaking to
you! words you were too young to
remember. 'Hush! Rosie, dear,' he said,
'Don't cry any more for poor mamma. Think
of poor papa, and try to comfort him!'
There, my love—there was the bitterest
distress, and the hardest to bear! I, your own
mother, standing like a spy, and hearing him
say that to the child I dared not own! 'Think
of poor papa!' My own Rosamond! you
know, now, what father I thought of when
he said those words! How could I tell him
the Secret? how could I give him the letter,
with his wife dead that morning—with
nobody but you to comfort him—with the awful
truth crushing down upon my heart, at every
word he spoke, as heavily as ever the rock
crushed down upon the father you never
saw!"

"Don't speak of it now!" said Rosamond.
"Don't let us refer again to the past: I
know all I ought to know, all I wish to
know of it. We will talk of the future,
mother, and of happier times to come. Let
me tell you about my husband. If any
words can praise him as he ought to be
praised, and thank him as he ought to be
thanked, I am sure mine ought—I am sure
yours will! Let me tell you what he said
and what he did when I read him the letter
that I found in the Myrtle Room. Yes, yes,
do let me!"

Warned by a remembrance of the doctor's
last injunctions; trembling in secret, as she
felt under her hand the heavy, toilsome,
irregular heaving of her mother's heart, as
she saw the rapid changes of colour from
pale to red, and from red to pale again that
fluttered across her mother's face, she
resolved to let no more words pass between
them which were of a nature to recal painfully
the sorrow and the suffering of the
years that were gone. After describing the
interview between her husband and herself
which had ended in the disclosure of the
Secret, she led her mother, with compassionate
abruptness, to speak of the future, of the
time when she would be able to travel again,
of the happiness of returning together to
Cornwall, of the little festival they might
hold on arriving at Uncle Joseph's house in
Truro, and of the time after that when they
might go on still further to Porthgenna, or
perhaps to some other place where new scenes
and new faces might help them to forget all
sad associations which it was best to think of
no more.

Rosamond was still speaking on these
topics; her mother was still listening to her
with growing interest in every word that she
said, when Uncle Joseph returned. He
brought in with him a basket of flowers and
a basket of fruit, which he held up in triumph
at the foot of his niece's bed.