but never happy. Rose knew now that he had always been guiltily afraid.

Lady Charlton had had a few moments' warning of disaster, for she was
horrified at the change in Rose's face when she met her at the door of
the church after Evensong. She herself had been utterly soothed and
rested by the beauty of the service. There was so much that fitted in
with all her ideals in mourning the great soldier. Little phrases about
him and about Rose flitted through her mind. Widows were widows indeed
to Lady Charlton. Rose would live now chiefly for Heaven and to soothe
the sorrows of earth. She did not say to herself that Rose would not be
broken-hearted and crushed, nor did she take long views. If years hence
Rose were to marry again her mother could make another picture in which
Sir David would recede into the background. Now he was her hero whom
Rose mourned, and whose loss had consecrated her more entirely to
Heaven; then he would unconsciously become in her mother's eyes a much
older man whom Rose had married almost as a child. There would be
nothing necessarily to mar the new picture if all else were fitting.

But the peace of gentle sorrow had left Rose's face, and it wore a look
her mother had never seen on it before. The breath of evil was close
upon her; it had penetrated very near, so near that she seemed evil to
herself as it embraced her. She was too dazed, too confused to remember
that Divine purity had been enclosed in that embrace. What terrified her
most was the thought that had suddenly come that possibly the unknown
woman in Florence had been the real lawful wife, and that her own
marriage had been a sin, a vile pretence and horror. For the first time
in her life the grandest words of confidence that have expressed and
interpreted the clinging faith of humanity seemed an unreality. Rose had
never known the faintest temptation to doubt Providence before this
miserable evening. She resented with her whole being the idea that