llid shadow she
was now. She had just finished writing a letter, a long, sad letter, and
it lay in her lap while she sat shivering over the fire. It was a letter
to her father, a tardy prayer for forgiveness, and a confession of all
her misdoings and wrongs--of Reginald Stanford's rather, for, of course,
all the blame was thrown upon him, though, if Rose had told the truth,
she would have found herself the more in fault of the two.

"I am sick, and poor, and broken-hearted," wrote Mrs. Stanford; "and I
want to go home and die. I have been very wicked, papa, but I have
suffered so much, that even those I have wronged most might forgive me.
Write to me at once, and say I may go home; I only want to go and die in
peace. I feel that I am dying now."

She folded the letter with a weary sigh and a hand that shook like an
old woman's, and rising, rang the bell. The brisk young woman answered
the summons at once with a smile on her face, and Mrs. Stanford's baby
crowing in her arms. They had been very kind to the poor young mother
and the fatherless babe during this time of trial; but Mrs. Stanford was
too ill and broken down to think about it, or feel grateful.

"Here, Jane," said Mrs. Stanford, holding out the letter, "give me the
baby, and post this letter."

Jane obeyed; and Rose, with the infant in her lap, sat staring gloomily
at the red coals.

"Two weeks before it will reach them, two weeks more before an answer
can arrive, and another two weeks before I can be with them. Oh, dear
me! dear me! how shall I drag out life during these interminable weeks.
If I could only die at once and end it all."

Tears of unutterable wretchedness and loneliness and misery coursed down
her pale, thin cheeks. Surely no one ever paid more dearly for love's
short madness than this unfortunate little Rose.

"Marry in haste and repent at leisure," she thought, with unspeakable
bitterness. "Oh, how happy I might have been to-day if I had only done
right last year. But I was mad and treacherous and false, and I dare-say
it serves me right. How can I ever look them in the face when I go
home?"

The weary weeks dragged on, how wearily and miserably only Rose knew.
She never went out; she sat all day long in that shabby parlour, and
stared blankly at the passers-by in the street, waiting, waiting.

The good-natured landlady and her daughter took charge of the baby
during those wretched weeks of expectation, or Mrs. Reginald Stanford's
o