quite well. But we wonder, is the image
our mind forms of Sally's answer to the third question correct or
incorrect? It presents her to us as answering rather petulantly: "Why
_shouldn't_ Dr. Conrad marry Miss Peplow, if he likes, and _she_
likes? I dare say _she'd_ be ready enough, though!" and then
pretending to look out of the window. And shortly afterwards: "I
suppose Prosy has a right to his private affairs, as much as I have
to mine." But with lips that tighten over her speech, without a smile.
Note that this is all pure hypothesis.

But she had nothing to conceal that she knew of, had Sally. What
a difference there was between her inner world and her mother's, who
could not breathe a syllable of that world's history to any living soul!

Rosalind acknowledged to herself now how great the relief had been
when, during the few hours that passed between her communication to
her old friend on his deathbed and the last state of insensibility
from which he never rallied, there had actually been on this earth one
other than herself who knew all her story and its strange outcome. For
those few hours she had not been alone, and the memory of it helped
her to bear her present loneliness. She could hear again, when she
woke in the stillness of the night, the voice of the old man, a
whisper struggling through his half-choked respiration, that said
again and again: "Oh, Rosey darling! can it be true? Thank God! thank
God!" And the fact that what she had then feared had never come
to pass--the fact that, contrary to her expectations, he had been
strangely able to look the wonder in the face, and never flinch from
it, seeing nothing in it but a priceless boon--this fact seemed to
give her now the fortitude to bear without help the burden of her
knowledge--the knowledge of who he was, this man that was beside her
in the stillness, this man whose steady breathing she could hear,
whose heart-beats she could count. And her heart dwelt on the old
soldier's last words, strangely, almost incredibly, resonant, a
hard-won victory in his dying fight for speech, "Evil has turned to
good. God be praised!" It had almost seemed as if the parting soul, on
the verge of the strangest chance man has to face, lost all measure of
the strangeness of any earthly thing, and was sensible of nothing but
the wonderment of the great cause of all.

But one thing that she knew (and could not explain) was that this
secret knowledge, burdensome in itself, r