“You had better go into the house,” said Sylvia, her eyes stern, her mouth smiling.  A maternal instinct which dominated her had awakened suddenly in the older woman’s heart.  She adored the girl to such an extent that the adoration fairly pained her.  Rose herself might easily have found this exacting affection, this constant watchfulness, irritating, but she found it sweet.  She could scarcely remember her mother, but the memory had always been as one of lost love.  Now she seemed to have found it again.  She fairly coquetted with this older woman who loved her, and whom she loved, with that charming coquettishness sometimes seen in a daughter towards her mother.  She presumed upon this affection which she felt to be so staple.  She affronted Sylvia with a delicious sense of her own power over her and an underlying affection, which had in it the protective instinct of youth which dovetailed with the protective instinct of age.

It had been planned that she was to return to New York immediately after Miss Farrel’s funeral.  In fact, her ticket had been bought and her trunk packed, when a telegram arrived rather late at night.  Rose had gone to bed when Sylvia brought it up to her room.  “Don’t be scared,” she said, holding the yellow envelope behind her.  Rose stared at her, round-eyed, from her white nest.  She turned pale.

“What is it?” she said, tremulously.

“There’s no need for you to go and think anything has happened until you read it,” Sylvia said.  “You must be calm.”

“Oh, what is it?”

“A telegram,” replied Sylvia, solemnly.  “You must be calm.”

Rose laughed.  “Oh, Mrs. Wilton and Miss Pamela are forever sending telegrams,” she said.  “Very likely it is only to say somebody will meet me at the Grand Central.”

Sylvia looked at the girl in amazement, as she coolly opened and read the telegram.  Rose’s face changed expression.  She regarded the yellow paper thoughtfully a moment before she spoke.

“If anything has happened, you must be calm,” said Sylvia, looking at her anxiously.  “Of course you have lived with those people so many years you have learned to think a good deal of them; that is only natural; but, after all, they ain’t your own.”

Rose laughed again, but in rather a perplexed fashion.  “Nothing has happened,” she said—­“at least, nothing that you are thinking of—­but—­”

“But what?”

“Why, Mrs. Wilton and Miss Pamela are going to sail for Genoa to-morrow, and that puts an end to my going to New York to them.”

A great brightness overspread Sylvia’s face.  “Well, you ain’t left stranded,” she said.  “You’ve got your home here.”

Rose looked gratefully at her.  “You do make me feel as if I had, and I don’t know what I should do if you did not, but”—­she frowned perplexedly—­“all the same, one would not have thought they would have gone off in this way without giving me a moment’s notice,” she said, in rather an injured fashion, “after I have lived with them so long.  I never thought they really cared much about me.  Mrs. Wilton and Miss Pamela look too hard at their own tracks to get much interest in anybody or anything outside; but starting off in this way!  They might have thought that I would like to go—­at least they might have told me.”