w would his voice sound--when she saw
him next? Or would some short and cruel letter come to say he had
remembered all, and now--for all the gratitude he owed her--he could
not bear to look upon her face again, hers who had done him such a
wrong! If so, what should she--what could she do?

There was only one counter-thought to this that brought with it a
momentary balm. She would send Sally to him to beg, beseech, implore
him not to repeat his headstrong error of the old years, to swear to
him that if only he could know all he would forgive--nay, more, that
if he could know quite all--the very whole of the sad story--not only
would he forgive, but rather seek forgiveness for himself for the too
harsh judgment he so rashly formed.

What should she say to Sally? how should she instruct her to plead
for her? Never mind that now. All she wanted in her lonely, nervous
delirium was the ease the thought gave her, the mere thought of the
force of Sally's fixed, immovable belief--_that_ she was certain
of--that whatsoever her mother had done was right. Never mind the exact
amount of revelation she would have to make to Sally. She might surely
indulge the idea, just to get at peace somehow, till--as pray Heaven it
might turn out--she should know that Gerry's mind was still unconscious
of its past. The chances were, so she thought mechanically to herself,
that all her alarms were groundless.

And at the first--strange as it is to tell--Sally's identity was only
that of the daughter she had now, that filled her life, and gave her
the heart to live. She was the Sally space was full of for her. _What_
she was, and _why_ she was, merged, as it usually did, in the broad
fact of her existence. But there was always the chance that this _what_
and _why_--two bewildering imps--should flaunt their unsolved conundrum
through her mother's baffled mind. There they were, sure enough in the
end, enjoying her inability to answer, dragging all she prayed daily
to be better able to forget out into the light of the memory they had
kindled. There they were, chuckling over her misery, and hiding--so
Rosalind feared--a worse question than any, keeping it back for a
final stroke to bring her mental fever to its height--how could Sally
be the daughter of a devil and her soul be free from the taint of his
damnation?

If Rosalind had only been well read in the mediaeval classics, and had
known that story of Merlin's birth--the Nativity that was to rewr