though the world would look coldly on me for doing so; but while they
remain atheists how is it possible?"

"Then he has a child?"

"One only, I believe, a girl of about your own age."

"Oh, mamma, how I should like to know her!"

"My dear Rose, how can you speak of such a thing? You don't realize that
she is an atheist, has not even been baptized, poor little thing!"

"But she is my cousin, and she is a girl just like me," said Rose. "I
should like to know her very much. I wonder whether she has come out
yet. I wonder how she enjoyed her first ball."

"My dear! They are not in society."

"How dull! What does she do all day, I wonder?"

"I cannot tell, I wish you would not talk about her, Rose; I should not
wish you even to think about her, except, indeed, to mention her in your
prayers."

"Oh, I'd much rather have her here to stay," said Rose, with a little
mischievous gleam in her eyes.

"Rose!"

"Why mamma, if she were a black unbeliever you would be delighted to
have her; it is only because she is white that you won't have anything
to do with her. You would have been as pleased as possible if I had made
friends with any of the ladies in the Zenanas."

Mrs. Fane-Smith looked uncomfortable, and murmured that that was a very
different question. Rose, seeing her advantage, made haste to follow it
up.

"At any rate, mamma, you will write to Uncle Luke now that he is in
trouble, and you'll let me send a note to his daughter? Only think,
mamma, she has lost her mother so suddenly! Just think how wretched she
must be! Oh, mamma, dear, I can't think how she can bear it!" and Rose
threw her arms round her mother's neck. "I should die too if you were to
die! I'm sure I should."

Rose was very persuasive, Mrs. Fane-Smith's motherly heart was touched;
she sat down there and then, and for the first time since the summer day
when Luke Raeburn had been turned out of his father's house, she wrote
to her brother. Rose in the meantime had taken a piece of paper from her
mother's writing desk, and with a fat volume of sermons by way of a desk
was scribbling away as fast as she could. This was her letter:

"My dear cousin,--I don't know your name, and have only just heard
anything about you, and the first thing I heard was that you were in
dreadful trouble. I only write to send you my love, and to say how very
sorry I am for you. We only came to England in the autumn. I like it
very much. I am going to my first ball