CHAPTER XXIV.
COALS OF FIRE.
One afternoon, about a fortnight after the receipt of that letter from France, Rose Stanford sat alone once more in the shabby little parlour of the London lodging-house.

It was late in April, but a fire burned feebly in the little grate, and she sat cowering over it wrapped in a large shawl.

She had changed terribly during these two weeks; she had grown old, and hollow-eyed, a haggard, worn, wretched woman.
It was her third day up, this April afternoon, for a low, miserable fever had confined her to her bed, and worn her to the pallid shadow she was now.

She had just finished writing a letter, a long, sad letter, and it lay in her lap while she sat shivering over the fire.

It was a letter to her father, a tardy prayer for forgiveness, and a confession of all her misdoings and wrongs--of Reginald Stanford's rather, for, of course, all the blame was thrown upon him, though, if Rose had told the truth, she would have found herself the more in fault of the two.
"I am sick, and poor, and broken-hearted," wrote Mrs.Stanford; "and I want to go home and die.