"_She_ held Rose off at arm's length, as if the poor betrayed child's touch were poison; shut her doors in her face, and all that; and why the poor thing didn't take to bad ways nobody knows. She went to a Lying-in Hospital, and staid there till the babe was born, and then there was a great noise, when it was found out how rich her aunt was; and when Mrs. Howe found out that people's tongues were wagging about it, she came forward and offered to pay her board in the country awhile.
"Mrs. Howe herself lives up in St. John's Square. She is trying to ride into fashionable society with her carriage and liveried servants; and that poor girl so heart-broken.
"Well, the Lord only knows what is going to become of poor Rose! Beauty and misery--beauty and misery--I've seen what came of that partnership before now."
Mrs. Bond had drank her cup of tea and eaten her one slice of toast. Rose had not yet come down to breakfast, and she hesitated to disturb her slumbers. So she put the tea-pot down by the fire, covered over the toast, and sat back in her great leathern chair.
How beautiful they looked, Rose and the boy, the night before, when she crept in, shading her lamp with her hand, to see if they were comfortable. The boy's rosy cheek lay close to his mother's blue-veined breast, and one of his little dimpled arms was thrown carelessly about her neck. Rose with her long hair unbound vailing her neck and shoulders, the tears still glistening on her long lashes, heaving now and then a sigh that it was pitiful to hear.
"Ah!" thought Mrs. Bond, "the father of the child should have looked in upon that scene! Those sighs, those tears, went they not up to heaven as swift witnesses against him?"
And so Mrs. Bond, the previous night, extinguished her small lamp, and knelt by the bed-side; she prayed for those wronged sleepers from the gushing fullness of her Christian motherly heart. Poor children!--for what was Rose but a child?
And now Mrs. Bond sat there over her breakfast-table thinking it all over. Her own life had been as placid as the little lake you could see from the cottage door; it was pitiful to her the storm of sorrow beating down upon that fair young head. She tried to see something bright in her future. She knew that though she herself had no wish beyond those humble walls, save to lie in the pleasant church-yard when her work was done, yet that life must be monotonous and dull there for one like Rose. She knew that the heart, when wretched and inactive, must prey upon itself. She wished she knew how to interest Rose in something. There was Charley, to be sure, dear little fellow, but he was at once a pain and a pleasure--a comfort and a reproach. Poor little lamb! he did not know why the caress he proffered was at one time so joyfully welcomed, then again repulsed with coldness; he did not know how cruelly the poor heart against which he nestled was rent with alternate hopes and fears; he did not know why he involuntarily hid his head from the strange, cold look, in those sometime--loving eyes.