e betrothed. I
can but tell you that her blushes were blushes of gratitude to one who
could devote his time to such a disgraced silly creature, and that
she, in her abject state, felt a secret pleasure in the protection
Ferdinand's name appeared to extend over her, and was hardly willing to
lose it.

So far Lady Elburne's tact and discipline had been highly successful.
One morning, in May, Ferdinand, strolling with Rose down the garden made
a positive appeal to her common sense and friendly feeling; by which she
understood that he wanted her consent to his marriage with her.

Rose answered:

'Who would have me?'

Ferdinand spoke pretty well, and ultimately got possession of her hand.
She let him keep it, thinking him noble for forgetting that another had
pressed it before him.

Some minutes later the letters were delivered. One of them contained
Juliana's dark-winged missive.

'Poor, poor Juley!' said Rose, dropping her head, after reading all that
was on the crumpled leaf with an inflexible face. And then, talking on,
long low sighs lifted her bosom at intervals. She gazed from time
to time with a wistful conciliatory air on Ferdinand. Rushing to her
chamber, the first cry her soul framed was:

'He did not kiss me!'

The young have a superstitious sense of something incontestably true in
the final protestations of the dead. Evan guiltless! she could not quite
take the meaning this revelation involved. That which had been dead
was beginning to move within her; but blindly: and now it stirred and
troubled; now sank. Guiltless all she had thought him! Oh! she knew she
could not have been deceived. But why, why had he hidden his sacrifice
from her?

'It is better for us both, of course,' said Rose, speaking the world's
wisdom, parrot-like, and bursting into tears the next minute. Guiltless,
and gloriously guiltless! but nothing--nothing to her!

She tried to blame him. It would not do. She tried to think of that
grovelling loathsome position painted to her by Lady Elburne's graphic
hand. Evan dispersed the gloomy shades like sunshine. Then in a sort of
terror she rejoiced to think she was partially engaged to Ferdinand, and
found herself crying again with exultation, that he had not kissed her:
for a kiss on her mouth was to Rose a pledge and a bond.

The struggle searched her through: bared her weakness, probed her
strength; and she, seeing herself, suffered grievously in her self-love.
Am I such a coward,