Robert Elsmere by Mrs. Humphry Ward (page 12)

‘He is going to work with them now,’ she thought bitterly; ‘soon he will be one of them–perhaps a Unitarian minister himself.’

And for the life of her, as he told his tale, she could find nothing but embarrassed monosyllables, and still more embarrassed silences, wherewith to answer him. Till at last he too fell silent, feeling once more the sting of a now habitual discomfort.

Presently, however, Catherine came to sit down beside him. She laid her head against his knee, saying nothing; but gathering his hand closely in both her own.

Poor woman’s heart! One moment in rebellion, the next a suppliant. He bent down quickly and kissed her.

‘Would you like,’ he said presently, after both had sat silent awhile in the firelight, ‘would you care to go to Madame de Netteville’s to-night?’

‘By all means’ said Catherine, with a sort of eagerness. It _was_ Friday she asked us for, wasn’t it? We will be quick over dinner, and I will go and dress.’

In that last ten minutes which Robert had spent with the Squire in his bedroom, on the Monday afternoon, when they were to have walked, Mr. Wendover had dryly recommended Elsmere to cultivate Madame de Netteville. He sat propped up in his chair, white, gaunt, and cynical, and this remark of his was almost the only reference he would allow to the Elsmere move.

‘You had better go there,’ he said huskily, ‘it will do you good. She gets the first-rate people and she makes them talk, which Lady Charlotte can’t. Too many fools at Lady Charlotte’s; she waters the wine too much.’

And he had persisted with the subject–using it as Elsmere thought, as a means of warding off other conversation. He would not ask Elsmere’s plans, and he would not allow a word about himself.

There had been a heart attack, old Meyrick thought, coupled with signs of nervous strain and excitement. It was the last ailment which evidently troubled the doctor most. But behind the physical breakdown, there was to Robert’s sense something else, a spiritual something, infinitely forlorn and piteous, which revealed itself wholly against the elder man’s will, and filled the younger with a dumb helpless rush of sympathy. Since his departure Robert had made the keeping up of his correspondence with the Squire a binding obligation, and he was to-night chiefly anxious to go to Madame de Netteville’s that he might write an account of it to Murewell.

Still the Squire’s talk, and his own glimpse of her at Murewell, had made him curious to see more of the woman herself. The Squire’s ways of describing her were always half approving, half sarcastic. Robert sometimes imagined that he himself had been at one time more under her spell than he cared to confess. If so, it must have been when she was still in Paris, the young English widow of a man of old French family, rich, fascinating, distinguished, and the centre of a small _salon_, admission to which was one of the social blue ribbons of Paris.

Since the war of 1870 Madame de Netteville had fixed her headquarters in London, and it was to her house in Hans Place that the Squire wrote to her about the Elsmeres. She owed Roger Wendover debts of various kinds, and she had an encouraging memory of the young clergyman on the terrace at Murewell. So she promptly left her cards, together with the intimation that she was at home always on Friday evenings.

‘I have never seen the wife,’ she meditated, as her delicate jewelled hand drew up the window of the brougham in front of Elsmere’s lodgings. ‘But if she is the ordinary country clergyman’s spouse, the Squire of course will have given the young man a hint.’

But whether from oblivion, or from some instinct of grim humor toward Catherine, whom he had always vaguely disliked, the Squire said not one word about his wife to Robert, in the course of their talk of Madame de Netteville.

Catherine took pains with her dress, sorely wishing to do Robert credit. She put on one of the gowns she had taken to Murewell when she married. It was black, simply made, and had been a favorite with both of them in the old surroundings.

So they drove off to Madame de Netteville’s. Catherine’s heart was beating faster than usual as she mounted the twisting stairs of the luxurious little house. All these new social experiences were a trial to her. But she had the vaguest, most unsuspicious ideas of what she was to see in this particular house.

A long low room was thrown open to them. Unlike most English rooms, it was barely though richly furnished. A Persian carpet of self-colored grayish blue, threw the gilt French chairs and the various figures sitting upon them into delicate relief. The walls were painted white, and had a few French mirrors and girandoles upon them, half a dozen fine French portraits, too, here and there, let into the wall in oval frames. The subdued light came from the white sides of the room, and seemed to be there solely for social purposes. You could hardly have read or written in the room, but you could see a beautiful woman in a beautiful dress there, and you could talk there, either _tete-a-tete_ or to the assembled company, to perfection, so cunningly was it all devised.

When the Elsmeres entered, there were about a dozen people present–ten gentleman and two ladies. One of the ladies, Madame de Netteville, was lying back in the corner of a velvet divan placed against the wall, a screen between her and a splendid fire that threw its blaze out into the room. The other, a slim woman with closely curled fair hair, and a neck abnormally long and white, sat near her, and the circle of men were talking indiscriminately to both.

As the footman announced Mr. and Mrs. Elsmere, there was a general stir of surprise. The men looked round; Madame de Netteville half rose with a puzzled look. It was more than a month since she had dropped her invitation. Then a flash, not altogether of pleasure, passed over her face, and she said a few hasty words to the woman near her, advancing the moment afterward to give her hand to Catherine.

‘This is very kind of you, Mrs. Elsmere, to remember me so soon. I had imagined you were hardly settled enough yet to give me the pleasure of seeing you.’

But the eyes fixed on Catherine, eyes which took in everything, were not cordial for all their smile.

Catherine, looking up at her, was overpowered by her excessive manner, and by the woman’s look of conscious sarcastic strength, struggling through all the outer softness of beauty and exquisite dress.

‘Mr. Elsmere, you will find this room almost as hot, I am afraid, as that afternoon on which we met last. Let me introduce you to Count Wielandt–Mr. Elsmere. Mrs. Elsmere, will you come over here, beside Lady Aubrey Willert,’

Robert found himself bowing to a young diplomatist, who seemed to him to look at him very much as he himself might have scrutinized an inhabitant of New Guinea. Lady Aubrey made an imperceptible movement of the head as Catherine was presented to her, and Madame de Netteville, smiling and biting her lip a little, fell back into her seat.

There was a faint odor of smoke in the room. As Catherine sat down, a young exquisite a few yards from her threw the end of a cigarette into the fire with a little sharp decided gesture. Lady Aubrey also pushed away a cigarette case which lay beside her hand.

Everybody there had the air more or less of an _habitue_ of the house; and when the conversation began again, the Elsmeres found it very hard, in spite of certain perfunctory efforts on the part of Madame de Netteville, to take any share in it.

‘Well, I believe the story about Desforets is true,’ said the fair-haired young Apollo, who had thrown away his cigarette, lolling back in his chair.

Catherine started, the little scene with Rose and Langham in the English rectory garden flashing incongruously back upon her.

‘If you got it from _The Ferret_, my dear Evershed,’ said the ex-Tory minister, Lord Rupert, ‘you may put it down as a safe lie. As for me, I believe she has a much shrewder eye to the main chance.’

‘What do you mean?’ said the other, raising astonished eyebrows.

‘Well, it doesn’t _pay_, you know, to write yourself down a fiend–not quite.’

‘What–you think it will affect her audiences? Well, that is a good joke!’ and the young man laughed immoderately joined by several of the other guests.

‘I don’t imagine it will make any difference to you, my good friend,’ returned Lord Rupert imperturbably; ‘but the British public haven’t got your nerve. They may take it awkwardly–I don’t say they will–when a woman who has turned her own young sister out of doors at night, in St. Petersburg, so that ultimately as a consequence the girl dies–comes to ask them to clap her touching impersonations of injured virtue.’

‘What has one to do with an actress’ private life, my dear Lord Rupert?’ asked Madame de Netteville, her voice slipping with a smooth clearness into the conversation, her eyes darting light from under straight black brows.

‘What indeed!’ said the young man who had begun the conversation, with a disagreeable enigmatical smile, stretching his hand for another cigarette, and drawing it back out with a look under his drooped eyelids–a look of cold impertinent scrutiny–at Catherine Elsmere.

‘Ah! well–I don’t want to be obtrusively moral–Heaven Forbid! But there is such a thing as destroying the illusion to such an extent that you injure your pocket. Desforets is doing it–doing it actually in Paris too.’

There was a ripple of laughter.

‘Paris and illusions–_O mon Dieu!_’ groaned young, Evershed, when he had done laughing, laying meditative hands on his knees and gazing into the fire.

‘I tell you I have seen it,’ said Lord Rupert, waxing combative, and slapping the leg he was nursing with emphasis. ‘The last time I went to see Desforets in Paris the theatre was crammed, and the house–theatrically speaking–_ice_. They received her in dead, silence–they gave her not one single recall–and they only gave her a clap, that I can remember, at those two or three points in the play where clap they positively must or burst. They go to see her–but they loathe her–and they let her know it.’

‘Bah!’ said his opponent, ‘it is only because they are tired of her. Her vagaries don’t amuse them any longer–they know them by heart. And–by George! she has some pretty rivals too, now!’ he added reflectively,–‘not to speak of the Bernhardt.’

‘Well, the Parisians _can_ be shocked,’ said Count Wielandt in excellent English, bending forward so as to get a good view of his hostess. ‘They are just now especially shocked by the condition of English morals!’

The twinkle in his eye was irresistible. The men, understanding his reference to the avidity with which certain English aristocratic scandals had been lately seized upon by the French papers, laughed out–so did Lady Aubrey. Madame de Netteville contented herself with a smile.

‘They profess to be shocked, too, by Renan’s last book,’ said the editor from the other side of the room.

‘Dear me!’ said Lady Aubrey, with meditative scorn, fanning herself lightly the while, her thin but extraordinarily graceful head and neck thrown out against the golden brocade of the cushion behind her.

‘Oh! what so many of them feel in Renan’s case, of course’ said Madame de Netteville, ‘is that every book he writes now gives a fresh opening to the enemy to blaspheme. Your eminent freethinker can’t afford just yet, in the present state of the world, to make himself socially ridiculous. The cause suffers.’

‘Just my feeling,’ said young Evershed calmly. ‘Though I mayn’t care a rap about him personally, I prefer that a man on my own front bench shouldn’t make a public ass of himself if he can help it–not for his sake, of course, but for mine!’

Robert looked at Catherine. She sat upright by the side of Lady Aubrey; her face, of which the beauty tonight seemed lost in rigidity, pale and stiff. With a contraction of heart he plunged himself into the conversation. On his road home that evening he had found an important foreign telegram posted up at the small literary club to which he had belonged since Oxford days. He made a remark about it now to Count Wielandt; and the diplomatist, turning rather unwillingly to face his questioner, recognized that the remark was a shrewd one.

Presently the young man’s frank intelligence had told. On his way to and from the Holy Land three years before, Robert had seen something of the East, and it so happened that he remembered the name of Count Wielandt as one of the foreign secretaries of legation present at an official party given by the English Ambassador at Constantinople, which he and his mother had attended on their return journey, in virtue of a family connection with the Ambassador. All that he could glean from memory he made quick use of now, urged at first by the remorseful wish to make this new world into which he had brought Catherine less difficult than he knew it must have been during the last quarter of an hour.

But after a while he found himself leading the talk of a section of the room, and getting excitement and pleasure out of the talk itself. Ever since that Eastern journey he had kept an eye on the subjects which had interested him then, reading in his rapid voracious way all that came across him at Murewell, especially in the Squire’s foreign newspapers and reviews, and storing it when read in a remarkable memory.

Catherine, after the failure of some conversational attempts between her and Madame de Netteville, fell to watching her husband with a start of strangeness and surprise. She had scarcely seen him at Oxford among his equals; and she had very rarely been present at his talks with the Squire. In some ways, and owing to the instinctive reserves set up between them for so long, her intellectual knowledge of him was very imperfect. His ease, his resource among these men of the world, for whom–independent of all else–she felt a country-woman’s dislike, filled her with a kind of bewilderment.

‘Are you new to London?’ Lady Aubrey asked her presently, in that tone of absolute detachment from the person addressed which certain women manage to perfection. She, too, had been watching the husband, and the sight had impressed her with a momentary curiosity to know what the stiff, handsome, dowdily-dressed wife was made of.

‘We have been two months here,’ said Catherine, her large gray eyes taking in her companion’s very bare shoulders, the costly fantastic dress, and the diamonds flashing against the white skin.

‘In what part?’

‘In Bedford Square.’

Lady Aubrey was silent. She had no ideas on the subject of Bedford Square at command.

‘We are very central,’ said Catherine, feeling desperately that she was doing Robert no credit at all, and anxious to talk if only something could be found to talk about.

‘Oh, yes, you are near the theatres,’ said the other indifferently.

This was hardly an aspect of the matter which had yet occurred to Catherine. A flash of bitterness ran through her. Had they left their Murewell life to be near the theatres, and kept at arm’s length by supercilious great ladies?

‘We are very far from the Park,’ she answered with an effort. ‘I wish we weren’t for my little girl’s sake.’

‘Oh, you have a little girl! How old?’

‘Sixteen months.’

‘Too young to be a nuisance yet. Mine are just old enough to be in everybody’s way. Children are out of place in London. I always want to leave mine in the country, but my husband objects,’ said Lady Aubrey coolly. There was a certain piquancy in saying frank things to this stiff, Madonna-faced woman.

Madame de Netteville, meanwhile, was keeping up a conversation in an undertone with young Evershed, who had come to sit on a stool beside her, and was gazing up at her with eyes of which the expression was perfectly understood by several persons present. The handsome, dissipated, ill-conditioned youth had been her slave and shadow for the last two years. His devotion now no longer mused her, and she was endeavoring to, get rid of it and of him. But the process was a difficult one, and took both time and _finesse_.

She kept her eye, notwithstanding, on the newcomers where the Squire’s introduction had brought to her that night. When the Elsmeres rose to go, she said good-by to Catherine with an excessive politeness, under which her poor guest, conscious of her own _gaucherie_ during the evening, felt the touch of satire she was perhaps meant to feel. But when Catherine was well ahead Madame de Netteville gave Robert one of her most brilliant smiles.

‘Friday evening, Mr. Elsmere; always Fridays. You will remember?’

The _naivete_ of Robert’s social view, and the mobility of his temper, made him easily responsive. He had just enjoyed half an hour’s brilliant talk with two or three of the keenest and most accomplished men in Europe. Catherine had slipped out of his sight meanwhile, and the impression of their _entree_ had been effaced. He made Madame de Netteville, therefore, a cordial smiling reply, before his tall slender form disappeared after that of his wife.

‘Agreeable–rather an acquisition!’ said Madame de Netteville to Lady Aubrey, with a light motion of the head toward Robert’s retreating figure. ‘But the wife! Good heavens! I owe Roger Wendover a grudge. I think he might have made it plain to those good people that I don’t want strange women at my Friday evenings.’

Lady Aubrey laughed. ‘No doubt she is a genius, or a saint, in mufti. She might be handsome too if some one would dress her.’

Madame de Netteville shrugged her shoulders. ‘Oh! life is not long enough to penetrate that kind of person,’ she said.

Meanwhile the ‘person’ was driving homeward very sad and ill at ease. She was vexed that she had not done better, and yet she was wounded by Robert’s enjoyment. The Puritan in her blood was all aflame. As she sat looking into the motley lamp-lit night she could have ‘testified’ like any prophetess of old.

Robert meanwhile, his hand slipped into hers, was thinking of Wielandt’s talk, and of some racy stories of Berlin celebrities told by a young _attache_ who had joined their group. His lips were lightly smiling, his brow serene.

But as he helped her down from the cab, and they stood in the hall together, he noticed the pale discomposure of her looks. Instantly the familiar dread and pain returned upon him.

‘Did you like it, Catherine?’ he asked her, with something like timidity, as they stood together by their bedroom fire.

She sank into a low chair and sat a moment staring at the blaze. He was startled by her look of suffering, and, kneeling, he put his arms tenderly round her.

‘Oh, Robert, Robert!’ she cried, falling on his neck.

‘What is it?’ he asked, kissing her hair.

‘I seem all at sea,’ she said in a choked voice, her face hidden,–‘the old landmarks swallowed up! I am always judging and condemning,–always protesting. What am I that I should judge? But how,–how,–can I help it?’

She drew herself away from him, once more looking into the fire with drawn brows.

‘Darling, the world is full of difference. Men and women take life in different ways. Don’t be so sure yours is the only right one.’

He spoke with a moved gentleness, taking her hand the while.

‘”_This_ is the way, walk ye in it!”‘ she said presently, with strong, almost stern emphasis. ‘Oh those women, and that talk! Hateful!’

He rose and looked down on her from the mantelpiece. Within him was a movement of impatience, repressed almost at once by the thought of that long night at Murewell, when he had vowed to himself to ‘make amends!’

And if that memory had not intervened she would still have disarmed him wholly.

‘Listen!’ she said to him suddenly, her eyes kindling with a strange childish pleasure. ‘Do you hear the wind, the west wind? Do you remember how it used to shake the house, how it used to come sweeping through the trees in the wood-path? It must be trying the study window now, blowing the vine against it.’

A yearning passion breathed through every feature. It seemed to him she saw nothing before her. Her longing soul was back in the old haunts, surrounded by the old loved forms and sounds. It went to his heart. He tried to soothe her with the tenderest words remorseful love could find. But the conflict of feeling–grief, rebellion, doubt, self-judgment–would not be soothed, and long after she had made him leave her and he had fallen asleep, she knelt on, a white and rigid figure in the dying firelight, the wind shaking the old house, the eternal murmur of London booming outside.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

Meanwhile, as if to complete the circle of pain with which poor Catherine’s life was compassed, it began to be plain to her that, in spite of the hard and mocking tone Rose generally adopted with regard to him, Edward Langham was constantly at the house in Lerwick Gardens, and that it was impossible he should be there so much unless in some way or other Rose encouraged it.

The idea of such a marriage–nay, of such a friendship–was naturally as repugnant as ever to her. It had been one of the bitterest moments of a bitter time, when, at their first meeting after the crisis in her life, Langham, conscious of a sudden movement of pity for a woman he disliked, had pressed the hand she held out to him in a way which clearly showed her what was in his mind, and had then passed on to chat and smoke with Robert in the study, leaving her behind to realize the gulf that lay between the present and that visit of his to Murewell, when Robert and she had felt in unison toward him, his opinions and his conduct to Rose, as toward everything else of importance in their life.

Now it seemed to her Robert must necessarily look at the matter differently, and she could not make up her mind to talk to him about it. In reality, his objections had never had the same basis as hers, and he would have given her as strong a support as ever, if she had asked for it. But she held her peace, and he, absorbed in other things, took no notice. Besides, he knew Langham too well. He had never been able to take Catherine’s alarms seriously.

An attentive onlooker, however, would have admitted that this time, at any rate, they had their justification. Why Langham was so much in the Leyburns’ drawing-room during these winter months, was a question that several people asked–himself not least. He had not only pretended to forget Rose Leyburn during the eighteen months which had passed since their first acquaintance at Murewell–he had for all practical purposes forgotten her. It is only a small proportion of men and women who are capable of passion on the great scale at all; and certainly, as we have tried to show, Langham was not among them. He had had a passing moment of excitement at Murewell, soon put down, and followed by a week of extremely pleasant sensations, which, like most of his pleasures, had ended in reaction and self-abhorrence. He had left Murewell remorseful, melancholy, and ill-at-ease, but conscious, certainly, of a great relief that he and Rose Leyburn were not likely to meet again for long.

Then his settlement in London had absorbed him, as all such matters absorb men who have become the slaves of their own solitary habits, and in the joy of his new freedom, and the fresh zest for learning it had aroused in him, the beautiful unmanageable child who had disturbed his peace at Murewell was not likely to be more, but less remembered. When he stumbled across her unexpectedly in the National Gallery, his determining impulse had been merely one of flight.

However, as he had written to Robert toward the beginning of his London residence, there was no doubt that his migration had made him for the time much more human, observant, and accessible. Oxford had become to him an oppression and a nightmare and as soon as he had turned his back on it, his mental lungs seemed once more to fill with air. He took his modest part in the life of the capital; happy in the obscurity afforded him by the crowd; rejoicing in the thought that his life and his affairs were once more his own, and the academical yoke had been slipped for ever.

It was in this mood of greater cheerfulness and energy that his fresh sight of Rose found him. For the moment, he was perhaps more susceptible than he ever could have been before to her young perfections, her beauty, her brilliancy, her provoking, stimulating ways. Certainly, from that first afternoon onward he became more and more restless to watch her, to be near her, to see what she made of herself and her gifts. In general, though it was certainly owing to her that he came so much, she took small notice of him. He regarded, or chose to regard, himself as a mere ‘item’–something systematically overlooked and forgotten in the bustle of her days and nights. He saw that she thought badly of him, that the friendship he might have had was now proudly refused him, that their first week together had left a deep impression of resentment and hostility in her mind. And all the same he came; and she asked him! And sometimes, after an hour when she had been more difficult or more satirical than usual, ending notwithstanding with a little change of tone, a careless ‘You will find us next Wednesday as usual; So-and-so is coming to play,’ Langham would walk home in a state of feeling he did not care to analyze, but which certainly quickened the pace of life a good deal. She would not let him try his luck at friendship again, but in the strangest slightest ways did she not make him suspect every now and then that he _was_ in some sort important to her, that he sometimes preoccupied her against her will; that her will, indeed, sometimes escaped her, and failed to control her manner to him?

It was not only his relations to the beauty, however, his interest in her career, or his perpetual consciousness of Mrs. Elsmere’s cold dislike and disapproval of his presence in her mother’s drawing-room, that accounted for Langham’s heightened mental temperature this winter. The existence and the proceedings of Mr. Hugh Flaxman had a very considerable share in it.

‘Tell me about Mr. Langham,’ said Mr. Flaxman once to Agnes Leyburn, in the early days of his acquaintance with the family; ‘is he an old friend?’

‘Of Robert’s,’ replied Agnes, her cheerful impenetrable look fixed upon the speaker. ‘My sister met him once for a week in the country at the Elsmeres’. My mother and I have been only just introduced to him.’

Hugh Flaxman pondered the information a little.

‘Does he strike you as–well–what shall we say?–unusual?’

His smile struck one out of her.

‘Even Robert might admit that’ she said demurely.

‘Is Elsmere so attached to him? I own I was provoked just now by his tone about Elsmere. I was remarking on the evident physical and mental strain your brother-in-law had gone through, and he said with a _nonchalance_ I cannot convey: “Yes, it is astonishing Elsmere should have ventured it. I confess I often wonder whether it was worth while.” “Why?” said I, perhaps a little hotly. Well, he didn’t know–wouldn’t say. But I gathered that according to him, Elsmere is still swathed in such an unconscionable amount of religion that the few rags and patches he has got rid of are hardly worth the discomfort of the change. It seemed to me the tone of the very cool spectator, rather than the friend. However–does your sister like him?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Agnes, looking her questioner full in the face.

Hugh Flaxman’s fair complexion flushed a little. He got up to go.

‘He is one of the most extraordinarily handsome persons I ever saw,’ he remarked as he buttoned up his coat. ‘Don’t you think so?’

‘Yes,’ said Agnes dubiously, ‘if he didn’t stoop, and if he didn’t in general look half-asleep.’

Hugh Flaxman departed more puzzled than ever as to the reason for the constant attendance of this uncomfortable anti-social person at the Leyburns’ house. Being himself a man of very subtle and fastidious tastes, he could imagine that so original a suitor, with such eyes, such an intellectual reputation so well sustained by scantiness of speech and the most picturesque capacity for silence, _might_ have attractions for a romantic and wilful girl. But where were the signs of it? Rose rarely talked to him, and was always ready to make him the target of a sub-acid raillery. Agnes was clearly indifferent to him, and Mrs. Leyburn equally clearly afraid of him. Mrs. Elsmere, too, seemed to dislike him, and yet there he was, week after week. Flaxman could not make it out.

Then he tried to explore the man himself. He started various topics with him–University reform, politics, music. In vain. In his most characteristic Oxford days Langham had never assumed a more wholesale ignorance of all subjects in heaven and earth, and never stuck more pertinaciously to the flattest forms of commonplace. Flaxman walked away at last boiling over. The man of parts masquerading as the fool is perhaps at least as exasperating as the fool playing at wisdom.

However, he was not the only person irritated. After one of these fragments of conversation, Langham also walked rapidly home in a state of most irrational petulance, his hands thrust with energy into the pockets of his overcoat.

‘No, my successful aristocrat, you shall not have everything your own way so easily with me or with _her!_ You may break me, but you shall not play upon me. And as for her, I will see it out–I will see it out!’

And he stiffened himself as he walked, feeling life electric all about him and a strange new force tingling in every vein.

Meanwhile, however, Mr. Flaxman was certainly having a good deal of his own way. Since the moment when his aunt, Lady Charlotte, had introduced him to Miss Leyburn–watching him the while with a half-smile which soon broadened into one of sly triumph–Hugh Flaxman had persuaded himself that country houses are intolerable even in the shooting season, and that London is the only place of residence during the winter for the man who aspires to govern his life on principles of reason. Through his influence and that of his aunt, Rose and Agnes–Mrs. Leyburn never went out–were being carried into all the high life that London can supply in November and January. Wealthy, highborn, and popular, he was gradually devoting his advantages in the freest way to Rose’s service. He was an excellent musical amateur, and was always proud to play with her; he had a fine country house, and the little rooms on Campden Hill were almost always filled with flowers from his gardens; he had a famous musical library, and its treasures were lavished on the girl violinist; he had a singularly wide circle of friends, and with his whimsical energy he was soon inclined to make kindness to the two sisters the one test of a friend’s good-will.

He was clearly touched by Rose; and what was to prevent his making an impression on her? To her sex he had always been singularly attractive. Like his sister, he had all sorts of bright impulses and audacities flashing and darting about him. He had a certain _hauteur_ with men, and could play the aristocrat when he pleased, for all his philosophical radicalism. But with women he was the most delightful mixture of deference and high spirits. He loved the grace of them, the daintiness of their dress, the softness of their voices. He would have done anything to please them, anything to save them pain. At twenty-five, when he was still ‘Citizen Flaxman’ to his college friends, and in the first fervors of a poetic defiance of prejudice and convention, he had married a gamekeeper’s pretty daughter. She had died with her child–died, almost, poor thing! of happiness and excitement–of the over-greatness of Heaven’s boon to her. Flaxman had adored her, and death had tenderly embalmed a sentiment to which life might possibly have been less kind. Since then he had lived in music, letters, and society, refusing out of a certain fastidiousness to enter politics, but welcomed and considered wherever he went, tall, good-looking, distinguished, one of the most agreeable and courted of men, and perhaps the richest _parti_ in London.

Still, in spite of it all, Langham held his ground–Langham would see it out! And indeed, Flaxman’s footing with the beauty was by no means clear–least of all to himself. She evidently liked him, but she bantered him a good deal; she would not be the least subdued or dazzled by his birth and wealth, or by those of his friends; and if she allowed him to provide her with pleasure, she would hardly ever take his advice, or knowingly consult his tastes.

Meanwhile she tormented them both a good deal by the artistic acquaintance she gathered about her. Mrs. Pierson’s world, as we have said, contained a good many dubious odds and ends, and she had handed them all over to Rose. The Leyburns’ growing intimacy with Mr. Flaxman and his circle, and through them with the finer types of the artistic life, would naturally and by degrees have carried them away somewhat from this earlier circle if Rose would have allowed it. But she clung persistently to its most unpromising specimens, partly out of a natural generosity of feeling, but partly also for the sake of that opposition her soul loved, her poor prickly soul, full under all her gayety and indifference of the most desperate doubt and soreness,–opposition to Catherine, opposition to Mr. Flaxman, but, above all, opposition to Langham.

Flaxman could often avenge himself on her–or rather on the more obnoxious members of her following–by dint of a faculty for light and stinging repartee which would send her, flushed and biting her lip, to have her laugh out in private. But Langham for a long time was defenseless. Many of her friends in his opinion were simply pathological curiosities–their vanity was so frenzied, their sensibilities so morbidly developed. He felt a doctor’s interest in them coupled with more than a doctor’s scepticism as to all they had to say about themselves. But Rose would invite them, would assume a _quasi_-intimacy with them; and Langham as well as everybody else had to put up with it.

Even the trodden worm however—-And there came a time when the concentration of a good many different lines of feeling in Langham’s mind betrayed itself at last in a sharp and sudden openness. It began to seem to him that she was specially bent often on tormenting _him_ by these caprices of hers, and he vowed to himself finally, with an outburst of irritation due in reality to a hundred causes, that he would assert himself, that he would make an effort at any rate to save her from her own follies.

One afternoon, at a crowded musical party, to which he had come much against his will, and only in obedience to a compulsion he dared not analyze, she asked him in passing if he would kindly find Mr. MacFadden, a bass singer, whose name stood next on the programme, and who was not to be seen in the drawing-room.

Langham searched the dining-room and the hall, and at last found Mr. MacFadden–a fair, flabby, unwholesome youth–in the little study or cloak room, in a state of collapse, flanked by whisky and water, and attended by two frightened maids, who handed over their charge to Langham and fled.

Then it appeared that the great man had been offended by a change in the programme, which hurt his vanity, had withdrawn from the drawing-room on the brink of hysterics, had called for spirits, which had been provided for him with great difficulty by Mrs. Leyburn’s maids, and was there drinking himself into a state of rage and rampant dignity which would soon have shown itself in a melodramatic return to the, drawing-room, and a public refusal to sing at all in a house where art had been outraged in his person.

Some of the old disciplinary instincts of the Oxford tutor awoke in Langham at the sight of the creature, and, with a prompt sternness which amazed himself, and nearly set MacFadden whimpering, he got rid of the man, shut the hall door on him, and went back to the drawing-room.

‘Well?’ said Rose in anxiety, coming up to him.

‘I have sent him away,’ he said briefly, an eye of unusual quickness and brightness looking down upon her; ‘he was in no condition to sing. He chose to be offended, apparently because he was put out of his turn, and has been giving the servants trouble.’

Rose flushed deeply, and drew herself up with a look of half trouble, half defiance, at Langham.

‘I trust you will not ask him again,’ he said, with the same decision. ‘And if I might say so, there are one or two people still here whom I should like to see you exclude at the same time.’

They had withdrawn into the bow window out of earshot of the rest of the room. Langham’s look turned significantly toward a group near the piano. It contained one or two men whom he regarded as belonging to a low type; men who, if it suited their purpose, would be quite ready to tell or invent malicious stories of the girl they were now flattering, and whose standards and instincts represented a coarser world than Rose in reality knew anything about.

Her eyes followed his.

‘I know,’ she said, petulantly, ‘that you dislike artists. They are not your world. They are mine.’

‘I dislike artists? What nonsense, too! To me personally these men’s ways don’t matter in the least. They go their road and I mine. But I deeply resent any danger of discomfort and annoyance to you!’

He still stood frowning, a glow of indignant energy showing itself in his attitude, his glance. She could not know that he was at that moment vividly realizing the drunken scene that might have taken place in her presence if he had not succeeded in getting the man safely out of the house. But she felt that he was angry, and mostly angry with her, and there was something so piquant and unexpected in his anger!

‘I am afraid,’ she said, with a queer sudden submissiveness, ‘you have been going through something very disagreeable. I am very sorry. Is it my fault?’ she added, with a whimsical flash of eye, half fun, half serious.

He could hardly believe his ears.

‘Yes, it is your fault, I think!’ he answered her, amazed at his own boldness. ‘Not that _I_ was annoyed–Heavens! what does that matter?–but that you and your mother and sister were very near an unpleasant scene. You will not take advice, Miss Leyburn, you will take your own way in spite of what anyone else can say or hint to you, and some day you will expose yourself to annoyance when there is no one near to protect you!’

‘Well, if so, it won’t be for want of a mentor,’ she said, dropping him a mock courtesy. But her lips trembled under its smile, and her tone had not lost its gentleness.

At this moment Mr. Flaxman, who had gradually established himself as the joint leader of these musical afternoons, came forward to summon Rose to a quartet. He looked from one to the other, a little surprise penetrating through his suavity of manner.

‘Am I interrupting you?’

‘Not at all,’ said Rose; then, turning back to Langham, she said, in a hurried whisper: ‘Don’t say anything about the wretched man: it would make mamma nervous. He shan’t come here again.’

Mr. Flaxman waited till the whisper was over, and then led her off, with a change of manner which she immediately perceived, and which lasted for the rest of the evening.

Langham went home and sat brooding over the fire. Her voice had not been so kind, her look so womanly, for months. Had she been reading ‘Shirley,’ and would she have liked him to play Louis Moore? He went into a fit of silent convulsive laughter as the idea occurred to him.

Some secret instinct made him keep away from her for a time. At last, one Friday afternoon, as he emerged from the Museum, where he had been collating the MSS. of some obscure Alexandrian, the old craving returned with added strength and he turned involuntarily westward.

An acquaintance of his, recently made in the course of work at the Museum, a young Russian professor, ran after him, and walked with him. Presently they passed a poster on the wall, which contained in enormous letters the announcement of Madame Desforets’ approaching visit to London, a list of plays, and the dates of performances.

The young Russian suddenly stopped and stood pointing at the advertisement, with shaking derisive finger, his eyes aflame, the whole man quivering with what looked like antagonism and hate.

Then he broke into a fierce flood of French. Langham listened till they had passed Piccadilly, passed the Park, and till the young _savant_ turned southward toward his Brompton lodgings.

Then Langham slowly climbed Campden Hill, meditating. His thoughts were an odd mixture of the things he had just heard, and of a scene at Murewell long ago when a girl had denounced him for ‘calumny.’

At the door of Lerwick Gardens he was informed that Mrs. Leyburn was upstairs with an attack of bronchitis. But the servant thought the young ladies were at home. Would he come in? He stood irresolute a moment, then went in on a pretext of ‘inquiry.’

The maid threw open the drawing-room door, and there was Rose sitting well into the fire–for it was a raw February afternoon–with a book.

She received him with all her old hard brightness. He was indeed instantly sorry that he had made his way in. Tyrant! was she displeased because he had slipped his chain for rather longer than usual?

However, he sat down, delivered his book, and they talked first about her mother’s illness. They had been anxious, she said, but the doctor, who had just taken his departure, had now completely reassured them.

‘Then you will be able probably after all to put in an appearance at Lady Charlotte’s this evening?’ he asked her.

The omnivorous Lady Charlotte of course had made acquaintance with him, in the Leyburns’ drawing-room, as she did with everybody who crossed her path, and three days before he had received a card from her for this evening.

‘Oh, yes! But I have had to miss a rehearsal this afternoon. That concert at Searle House is becoming a great nuisance.’

‘It will be a brilliant affair, I suppose. Princes on one side of you–and Albani on the other. I see they have given you the most conspicuous part as violinist.’

‘Yes,’ she said with a little satirical tightening of the lip. ‘Yes–I suppose I ought to be much flattered.’

‘Of course–‘ he said, smiling, but embarrassed. ‘To many people you must be at this moment one of the most enviable persons in the world. A delightful art–and every opportunity to make it tell!’

There was a pause. She looked into the fire.

‘I don’t know whether it is a delightful art,’ she said presently, stifling a little yawn. ‘I believe I am getting very tired of London. Sometimes I think I shouldn’t be very sorry to find myself suddenly spirited back to Burwood!’

Langham gave vent to some incredulous interjection. He had apparently surprised her in a fit of _ennui_ which was rare with her.

‘Oh no, not yet!’ she said suddenly, with a return of animation. ‘Madame Desforets comes next week, and I am to see her.’ She drew herself up and turned a beaming face upon him. Was there a shaft of mischief in her eye? He could not tell. The firelight was perplexing.

‘You are to see her?’ he said slowly. ‘Is she coming here?’

‘I hope so. Mrs. Pierson is to bring, her. I want mamma to have the amusement of seeing her. My artistic friends are a kind of tonic to her–they excite her so much. She regards them as a sort of show–much as you do, in fact, only in a more charitable fashion.’

But he took no notice of what she was saying.

‘Madame Desforets is coming here?’ he sharply repeated, bending forward, a curious accent in his tone.

‘Yes!’ she replied, with apparent surprise. Then with a careless smile: ‘Oh, I remember when we were at Murewell, you were exercised that we should know her. Well, Mr. Langham, I told you then that you were only echoing unworthy gossip. I am in the same mind still. I have seen her, and you haven’t. To me she is the greatest actress in the world, and an ill-used woman to boot!’

Her tone had warmed with every sentence. It struck him that she had wilfully brought up the topic–that it gave her pleasure to quarrel with him.

He put down his hat deliberately, got up, and stood with his back to the fire. She looked up at him curiously. But the dark regular face was almost hidden from her.

‘It is strange,’ he said slowly; ‘very strange–that you should have told me this at this moment! Miss Leyburn, a great deal of the truth about Madame Desforets I could neither tell, nor could you hear. There are charges against her proved in open court, again and again, which I could not even mention in your presence. But one thing I can speak of. Do you know the story of the sister at St. Petersburg?’

‘I know no stories against Madame Desforets,’ said Rose loftily, her quickened breath responding to the energy of his tone. ‘I have always chosen not to know them.’

‘The newspapers were full of this particular story just before Christmas. I should have thought it must have reached you.’

‘I did not see it,’ she replied stiffly; ‘and I cannot see what good purpose is to be served by your repeating it to me, Mr. Langham.’

Langham could have smiled at her petulance, if he had not for once been determined and in earnest.

‘You will let me tell it, I hope?’ he said quietly. ‘I will tell it so that it shall not offend your ears. As it happens, I myself thought it incredible at the time. But, by an odd coincidence, it has just this afternoon been repeated to me by a man who was an eyewitness of part of it.’

Rose was silent. Her attitude Was _hauteur_ itself, but she made no further active opposition.

‘Three months ago–‘ he began, speaking with some difficulty, but still with a suppressed force of feeling which amazed his hearer-‘Madame Desforets was acting in St. Petersburg. She had with her a large company, and among them her own young sister, Elise Romey, a girl of eighteen. This girl had been always kept away from Madame Desforets by her parents, who had never been sufficiently consoled by their eldest daughter’s artistic success for the infamy of her life.’

Rose started indignantly. Langham gave her no time to speak.

‘Elise Romey, however, had developed a passion for the stage. Her parents were respectable–and you know young girls in France are brought up strictly. She knew next to nothing of her sister’s escapades. But she knew that she was held to be the greatest actress in Europe–the photographs in the shops told her that she was beautiful. She conceived a romantic passion for the woman whom she had last seen when she was a child of five, and actuated partly by this hungry affection, partly by her own longing wish to become an actress, she escaped from home and joined Madame Desforets in the South of France. Madame Desforets seems at first to have been pleased to have her. The girl’s adoration pleased her vanity. Her presence with her gave her new opportunities of posing. I believe,’ and Langham gave a little dry laugh, ‘they were photographed together at Marseilles with their arms round each other’s necks, and the photograph had an immense success. However on the way to St. Petersburg, difficulties arose. Elise was pretty, in a _blonde_ childish way, and she caught the attention of the _jeune premier_ of the company, a man’–the speaker became somewhat embarrassed-‘whom Madame Desforets seems to have regarded as her particular property. There were scenes at different towns on the journey. Elise became frightened–wanted to go home. But the elder sister, having begun tormenting her, seems to have determined to keep her hold on her, as a cat keeps and tortures a mouse–mainly for the sake of annoying the man of whom she was jealous. They arrived at St. Petersburg in the depth of winter. The girl was worn out with travelling, unhappy, and ill. One night in Madame Desforets apartment there was a supper party, and after it a horrible quarrel. No one exactly knows what happened. But toward twelve o’clock that night Madame Desforets turned her young sister in evening dress, a light shawl round her, out into the snowy streets of St Petersburg, barred the door behind her, and revolver in hand dared the wretched man who had caused the _fracas_ to follow her.’

Rose sat immovable. She had grown pale, but the firelight was not revealing.

Langham turned away from her toward the blaze, holding out his hands to it mechanically.

‘The poor child,’ he said, after a pause, in a lower voice, ‘wandered about for some hours. It was a frightful night–the great capital was quite strange to her. She was insulted–fled this way and that–grew benumbed with cold and terror, and was found unconscious in the early morning under the archway of a house some two miles from her sister’s lodgings.’

There was a dead silence. Then Rose drew a long quivering breath.

‘I do not believe it!’ she said passionately. ‘I cannot believe it!’

‘It was amply proved at the time,’ said Langham dryly, ‘though of course Madame Desforets tried to put her own color on it. But I told you I had private information. On one of the floors of the house where Elise Romey was picked up, lived a young university professor. He is editing an important Greek text, and has lately had business at the Museum. I made friends with him there. He walked home with me this afternoon, saw the announcement of Madame Desforets coming, and poured out the story. He and his wife nursed the unfortunate girl with devotion. She lived just a week, and died of inflammation of the lungs. I never in my life heard anything so pitiful as his description of her delirium, her terror, her appeals, her shivering misery of cold.’

There was a pause.

‘She is not a woman,’ he said presently, between his teeth. ‘She is a wild beast.’

Still there was silence, and still he held out his hand to the flame which Rose too was staring at. At last he turned round.

‘I have told you a shocking story,’ he said hurriedly, ‘Perhaps I ought not to have done it. But, as you sat there talking so lightly, so gayly, it suddenly became to me utterly intolerable that that woman should ever sit here in this room–talk to you–call you by your name–laugh with you–touch your hand! Not even your wilfulness shall carry you so far–you _shall_ not do it!’

He hardly knew what he said. He was driven on by a passionate sense of physical repulsion to the notion of any contact between her pure fair youth and something malodorous and corrupt. And there was beside a wild unique excitement in claiming for once to stay–to control her.

Rose lifted her head slowly. The fire was bright. He saw the tears in her eyes, tears of intolerable pity for another girl’s awful story. But through the tears something gleamed–a kind of exultation–the exultation which the magician feels when he has called spirits from the vasty deep and after long doubt and difficult invocation they rise at last before his eyes.

‘I will never see her again’–she said in a low wavering voice, but she too was hardly conscious of her own words. Their looks were on each other; the ruddy capricious light touched her glowing cheeks, her straight-lined grace, her white hand. Suddenly from the gulf of another’s misery into which they had both been looking, there had sprung up, by the strange contrariety of human things, a heat and intoxication of feeling, wrapping them round, blotting out the rest of the world from them like a golden mist. ‘Be always thus!’ her parted lips, her liquid eyes were saying to him. His breath seemed to fail him; he was lost in bewilderment.

There were sounds outside–Catherine’s voice. He roused himself with a supreme effort.

‘To-night–at Lady Charlotte’s?’

‘To-night,’ she said, and held out her hand.

A sudden madness seized him–he stooped–his lips touched it–it was hastily drawn away, and the door opened.

CHAPTER XXXV.

‘In the first place, my dear aunt,’ said Mr. Flaxman, throwing himself back in his chair in front of Lady Charlotte’s drawing-room fire, ‘you may spare your admonitions, because it is becoming more and more clear to me that, whatever my sentiments may be, Miss Leyburn never gives a serious thought to me.’

He turned to look at his companion over his shoulder. His tone and manner were perfectly gay, and Lady Charlotte was puzzled by him.

‘Stuff and nonsense!’ replied the lady with her usual emphasis; ‘I never flatter you, Hugh, and I don’t mean to begin now, but it would be mere folly not to recognize that you have advantages which must tell on the mind of any girl in Miss Leyburn’s position.’

Hugh Flaxman rose, and, standing before the fire with his hands in his pockets, made what seemed to be a close inspection of his irreproachable trouser-knees.

‘I am sorry for your theory, Aunt Charlotte,’ he said, still stooping, ‘but Miss Leyburn doesn’t care twopence about my advantages.’

‘Very proper of you to say so,’ returned Lady Charlotte sharply; ‘the remark, however, my good sir, does more credit to your heart than your head.’

‘In the next place,’ he went on undisturbed, ‘why you should have done your best this whole winter to throw Miss Leyburn and me together, if you meant in the end to oppose my marrying her, I don’t quite see.’

He looked up smiling. Lady Charlotte reddened ever so slightly.

‘You know my weakness,’ she said presently, with an effrontery which delighted her nephew. ‘She is my latest novelty, she excites me, I can’t do without her. As to you, I can’t remember that you wanted much encouragement, but I acknowledge, after all these years of resistance–resistance to my most legitimate efforts to dispose of you–there was a certain piquancy in seeing you caught at last!’

‘Upon my word!’ he said, throwing back his head with a not very cordial laugh, in which, however, his aunt joined. She was sitting opposite to him, her powerful, loosely-gloved hands crossed over the rich velvet of her dress, her fair large face and grayish hair surmounted by a mighty cap, as vigorous, shrewd, and individual a type of English middle age as could be found. The room behind her and the second and third drawing-rooms were brilliantly lighted. Mr. Wynnstay was enjoying a cigar in peace in the smoking-room, while his wife and nephew were awaiting the arrival of the evening’s guests upstairs.

Lady Charlotte’s mind had been evidently much perturbed by the conversation with her nephew of which we are merely describing the latter half. She was laboring under an uncomfortable sense of being hoist with her own petard–an uncomfortable memory of a certain warning of her husband’s, delivered at Murewell.

‘And now,’ said Mr. Flaxman, ‘having confessed in so many words that you have done your best to bring me up to the fence, will you kindly recapitulate the arguments why in your opinion I should not jump it?’

‘Society, amusement, flirtation, are one thing,’ she replied with judicial imperativeness, ‘marriage is another. In these democratic days we must know everybody; we should only marry our equals.’

The instant, however, the words were out of her mouth, she regretted them. Mr. Flaxman’s expression changed.

‘I do not agree with you,’ he said calmly, ‘and you know I do not. You could not, I imagine, have relied much upon _that_ argument.’

‘Good gracious, Hugh!’ cried Lady Charlotte crossed, ‘you talk as if I were really the old campaigner some people suppose me to be. I have been amusing myself–I have liked to see you amused. And it is only the last few weeks, since you have begun to devote yourself so tremendously, that I have come to take the thing seriously at all. I confess, if you like, that I have got you into the scrape–now I want to get you out of it! I am not thin-skinned, but I hate family unpleasantnesses–and you know what the Duke will say.’

‘The Duke be–translated!’ said Flaxman, coolly. ‘Nothing of what you have said or could say on this point, my dear aunt, has the smallest weight with me. But Providence has been kinder to you and the Duke than you deserve. Miss Leyburn does not care for me, and she does care–or I am very much mistaken–for somebody else.’

He pronounced the words deliberately, watching their effect upon her.

‘What, that Oxford nonentity, Mr. Langham, the Elsmeres’ friend? Ridiculous! What attraction could a man of that type have for a girl of hers?’

‘I am not bound to supply an answer to that question,’ replied her nephew. ‘However, he is not a nonentity. Far from it! Ten years ago, when I was leaving Cambridge, he was certainly one of the most distinguished of the young Oxford tutors.’

‘Another instance of what university reputation is worth!’ said Lady Charlotte scornfully. It was clear that even in the case of a beauty whom she thought it beneath him to marry, she was not pleased to see her nephew ousted by the _force majeure_ of a rival–and that rival whom she regarded as an utter nobody, having neither marketable eccentricity, nor family, nor social brilliance to recommend him.

Flaxman understood her perplexity and watched her with critical, amused eyes.

‘I should like to know–‘ he said presently, with a curious slowness and suavity,–‘I should greatly like to know why you asked him here to-night?’

‘You know perfectly well that I should ask anybody–a convict, a crossing sweeper–if I happened to be half an hour in the same room with him!’

Flaxman laughed.

‘Well, it may be convenient to-night,’ he said reflectively. ‘What are we to do–some thought-reading?’

‘Yes. It isn’t a crush! I have only asked about thirty or forty people. Mr. Denman is to manage it.’

She mentioned an amateur thought-reader greatly in request at the moment.

Flaxman cogitated for a while and then propounded a little plan to his aunt, to which she, after some demur, agreed.

‘I want to make a few notes,’ he said dryly, when it was arranged; ‘I should be glad to satisfy myself.’

When the Miss Leyburns were announced, Rose, though the younger, came in first. She always took the lead by a sort of natural right, and Agnes never dreamt of protesting. To-night the sisters were in white. Some soft creamy stuff was folded and draped about Rose’s slim shapely figure in such a way as to bring out all its charming roundness and grace. Her neck and arms bore the challenge of the dress victoriously. Her red-gold hair gleamed in the light of Lady Charlotte’s innumerable candles. A knot of dusky blue feathers on her shoulder, and a Japanese fan of the some color, gave just that touch of purpose and art which the spectators seems to claim as the tribute answering to his praise in the dress of a young girl. She moved with perfect self-possession, distributing a few smiling looks to the people she knew as she advanced toward Lady Charlotte. Anyone with a discerning eye could have seen that she was in that stage of youth when a beautiful woman is like a statue to which the master is giving the finishing touches. Life, the sculptor, had been at work upon her, refining here, softening there, planing away awkwardness, emphasizing grace, disengaging as it were, week by week, and month by month, all the beauty of which the original conception was capable. And the process is one attended always by a glow and sparkle, a kind of effluence of youth and pleasure, which makes beauty more beautiful and grace more graceful.

The little murmur and rustle of persons turning to look, which had already begun to mark her entrance into a room, surrounded Rose as she walked up to Lady Charlotte. Mr. Flaxman, who had been standing absently silent, woke up directly she appeared, and went to greet her before his aunt.

‘You failed us at rehearsal,’ he said with smiling reproach; ‘we were all at sixes and sevens.’

‘I had a sick mother, unfortunately, who kept me at home. Lady Charlotte, Catherine couldn’t come. Agnes and I are alone in the world. Will you chaperon us?’

‘I don’t know whether I will accept the responsibility to-night–in that new gown’–replied Lady Charlotte grimly, putting up her eyeglass to look at it and the wearer. Rose bore the scrutiny with a light smiling silence, even though she knew Mr. Flaxman was looking too.

‘On the contrary,’ she said, ‘one always feels so particularly good and prim in a new frock.’

‘Really? I should have thought it one of Satan’s likeliest moments,’ said Flaxman, laughing–his eyes, however, the while saying quite other things to her, as they finished their inspection of her dress.

Lady Charlotte threw a sharp glance first at him and then at Rose’s smiling ease, before she hurried off to other guests.

‘I have made a muddle as usual,’ she said to herself in disgust, ‘perhaps even a worse one than I thought!’

Whatever might be Hugh Flaxman’s state of mind, however, he never showed greater self-possession than on this particular evening.

A few minutes after Rose’s entry he introduced her for the first time to his sister, Lady Helen. The Varleys had only just come up to town for the opening of Parliament, and Lady Helen had come to-night to Martin Street, all ardor to see Hugh’s new adoration, and the girl whom all the world was beginning to talk about–both as a beauty and as an artist. She rushed at Rose, if any word so violent can be applied to anything so light and airy as Lady Helen’s movements, caught the girl’s hands in both hers, and, gazing up at her with undisguised admiration, said to her the prettiest, daintiest, most effusive things possible. Rose–who with all her lithe shapeliness, looked over-tall and even a trifle stiff beside the tiny bird-like Lady Helen–took the advances of Hugh Flaxman’s sister with a pretty flush of flattered pride. She looked down at the small radiant creature with soft and friendly eyes, and Hugh Flaxman stood by, so far well pleased.

Then he went off to fetch Mr. Denman, the hero of the evening, to be introduced to her. While he was away, Agnes, who was behind her sister, saw Rose’s eyes wandering from Lady Helen to the door, restlessly searching and then returning.

Presently through the growing crowd round the entrance Agnes spied a well-known form emerging.

‘Mr. Langham! But Rose never told me he was to be here to-night, and how dreadful he looks!’

Agnes was so startled that her eyes followed Langham closely across the room. Rose had seen him at once; and they had greeted each other across the crowd. Agnes was absorbed, trying to analyze what had struck her so. The face was always melancholy, always pale, but to-night it was ghastly, and from the whiteness of cheek and brow, the eyes, the jet black hair stood out in intense and disagreeable relief. She would have remarked on it to Rose, but that Rose’s attention was claimed by the young thought-reader, Mr. Denman, whom Mr. Flaxman had brought up. Mr. Denman was a fair-haired young Hercules, whose tremulous, agitated manner contrasted oddly with his athlete’s looks. Among other magnetisms he was clearly open to the magnetism of women, and he stayed talking to Rose,–staring furtively at her the while from under his heavy lids,–much longer than the girl thought fair.

‘Have you seen any experiments in the working of this new force before?’ he asked her with a solemnity which sat oddly on his commonplace bearded face.

‘Oh, yes!’ she said flippantly. ‘We have tried it sometimes. It is very good fun.’

He drew himself up. ‘Not _fun_,’ he said impressively; ‘not fun. Thought-reading wants seriousness; the most tremendous things depend upon it. If established it will revolutionize our whole views of life. Even a Huxley could not deny that!’

‘She studied him with mocking eyes. ‘Do you imagine this party to-night looks very serious?’

His face fell.

‘One can seldom get people to take it scientifically,’ he admitted, sighing. Rose, impatiently, thought him a most preposterous young man. Why was he not cricketing, or shooting, or exploring, or using the muscles Nature had given him so amply, to some decent practical purpose, instead of making a business out of ruining his own nerves and other people’s night after night in hot drawing-rooms? And when would he go away?

‘Come, Mr. Denman,’ said Flaxman, laying hands upon him; ‘the audience is about collected, I think. Ah, there you are!’ and he gave Langham a cool greeting. ‘Have you seen anything yet of these fashionable dealings with the devil!’

‘Nothing. Are you a believer?’

Flaxman shrugged his shoulders. ‘I never refuse an experiment of any kind,’ he added with an odd change of voice. Come, Denman.’

And the two went off. Langham came to stand beside Rose, while Lord Rupert, as jovial as ever, and bubbling over with gossip about the Queen’s speech, appropriated Lady Helen, who was the darling of all elderly men.

They did not speak. Rose sent him a ray from eyes full of a new divine shyness. He smiled gently in answer to it, and full of her own young emotions, and of the effort to conceal it from all the world, she noticed none of that change which had struck Agnes.

And all the while, if she could have penetrated the man’s silence! An hour before this moment Langham had vowed that nothing should take him to Lady Charlotte’s that night. And yet here he was, riveted to her side, alive like any normal human being to every detail of her loveliness, shaken to his inmost being by the intoxicating message of her look, of the transformation which had passed in an instant over the teasing difficult creature of the last few months.

At Murewell, his chagrin had been _not_ to feel, _not_ to struggle, to have been cheated out of experience. Well, here is the experience in good earnest! And Langham is wrestling with it for dear life. And how little the exquisite child beside him knows of it or of the man on whom she is spending her first wilful passion! She stands strangely exulting in her own strange victory over a life, a heart, which had defied and eluded her. The world throbs and thrills about her, the crowd beside her is all unreal, the air is full of whisper, of romance.

The thought-reading followed its usual course. A murder and its detection were given in dumb show. Then it was the turn of card-guessing, bank-note-finding, and the various other forms of telepathic hide and seek. Mr. Flaxman superintended them all, his restless eye wandering every other minute to the further drawing-room in which the lights had been lowered, catching there always the same patch of black and white,–Rose’s dress and the dark form beside her.

‘Are you convinced? Do you believe?’ said Rose, merrily looking up at her companion.

‘In telepathy? Well–so far–I have not got beyond the delicacy and perfection of Mr. Denman’s muscular sensation. So much I am sure of!’

‘Oh, but your scepticism is ridiculous!’ she said gayly. ‘We know that some people have an extraordinary power over others.’

‘Yes, that certainly we know!’ he answered, his voice dropping, an odd, strained note in it. ‘I grant you that.’

She trembled deliciously. Her eyelids fell. They stood together, conscious only of each other.

‘Now,’ said Mr. Denman, advancing to the doorway between the two drawing-rooms, ‘I have done all I can–I am exhausted. But let me beg of you all to go on with some experiments among yourselves. Every fresh discovery of this power in a new individual is a gain to science. I believe about one in ten has some share of it. Mr. Flaxman and I will arrange everything, if anyone will volunteer?’

The audience broke up into groups, laughing, chatting, suggesting this and that. Presently Lady Charlotte’s loud dictatorial voice made itself heard, as she stood eyeglass in hand looking round the circle of her guests.

‘Somebody must venture–we are losing time.’

Then the eyeglass stopped at Rose, who was now sitting tall and radiant on the sofa, her blue fan across her white knees. ‘Miss Leyburn–you are always public-spirited–will you be victimized for the good of science?’

The girl got up with a smile.

‘And Mr. Langham–will you see what you can do with Miss Leyburn? Hugh–we all choose her task, don’t we–then Mr. Langham wills?’

Flaxman came up to explain. Langham had turned to Rose–a wild fury with Lady Charlotte and the whole affair sweeping through him. But there was no time to demur; that judicial eye was on them; the large figure and towering cap bent toward him. Refusal was impossible.

‘Command me!’ he said with a sudden straightening of the form and a flush on the pale cheek. ‘I am afraid Miss Leyburn will find me a very bad partner.’

‘Well, now then!’ said Flaxman; ‘Miss Leyburn, will you please go down into the library while we settle what you are to do?’

She went, and he held the door open for her. But she passed out unconscious of him–rosy, confused, her eyes bent on the ground.

‘Now, then, what shall Miss Leyburn do?’ asked Lady Charlotte in the same loud emphatic tone.

‘If I might suggest something quite different from anything that has been yet tried,’ said Mr. Flaxman, ‘suppose we require Miss Leyburn to kiss the hand of the little marble statue of Hope in the far drawing-room. What do you say, Langham?’

‘What you please!’ said Langham, moving up to him. A glance passed between the two men. In Langham’s there was a hardly sane antagonism and resentment, in Flaxman’s an excited intelligence.

‘Now then,’ said Flaxman coolly, ‘fix your mind steadily on what Miss Leyburn is to do–you must take her hand–but except in thought, you must carefully follow and not lead her. Shall I call her?’

‘Langham abruptly assented. He had a passionate sense of being watched–tricked. Why were he and she to be made a spectacle for this man and his friends! A mad irrational indignation surged through him.

Then she was led in blindfolded, one hand stretched out feeling the air in front of her. The circle of people drew back. Mr. Flaxman and Mr. Denman prepared, notebook in hand, to watch the experiment. Langham moved desperately forward.

But the instant her soft trembling hand touched his, as though by enchantment, the surrounding scene, the faces, the lights, were blotted out from him. He forgot his anger, he forgot everything but her and this thing she was to do. He had her in his grasp–he was the man, the master–and what enchanting readiness to yield in the swaying pliant form! In the distance far away gleamed the statue of Hope, a child on tiptoe, one outstretched arm just visible from where he stood.

There was a moment’s silent expectation. Every eye was riveted on the two figures–on the dark handsome man–on the blindfolded girl.

At last Rose began to move gently forward. It was a strange wavering motion. The breath came quickly through her slightly parted lips; her bright color was ebbing. She was conscious of nothing but the grasp in which her hand was held,–otherwise her mind seemed a blank. Her state during the next few seconds was not unlike the state of some one under the partial influence of an anaesthetic; a benumbing grip was laid on all her faculties; and she knew nothing of how she moved or where she was going.

Suddenly the trance cleared away. It might have lasted half an hour or five seconds, for all she knew. But she was standing beside a small marble statue in the farthest drawing-room, and her lips had on them a slight sense of chill as though they had just been laid to something cold.

She pulled off the handkerchief from her eyes. Above her was Langham’s face, a marvellous glow and animation in every line of it.

‘Have I done it?’ she asked in a tremulous whisper.

For the moment her self-control was gone. She was still Bewildered.

He nodded, smiling.

‘I am so glad,’ she said, still in the same quick whisper, gazing at him. There was the most adorable abandon in her whole look and attitude. He could but just restrain himself from taking her in his arms, and for one bright flashing instant each saw nothing but the other.

The heavy curtain which had partially hidden the door of the little old-fashioned powder-closet as they approached it, and through which they had swept without heeding, was drawn back with a rattle.

‘She has done it! Hurrah!’ cried Mr. Flaxman. ‘What a rush that last was, Miss Leyburn! You left us all behind!’

Rose turned to him, still dazed, drawing her hand across her eyes. A rush? She had known nothing about it!

Mr. Flaxman turned and walked back, apparently to report to his aunt, who, with Lady Helen, had been watching the experiment from the main drawing-room. His face was a curious mixture of gravity and the keenest excitement. The gravity was mostly sharp compunction. He had satisfied a passionate curiosity, but in the doing of it he had outraged certain instincts of breeding and refinement which were now revenging themselves.

‘Did she do it exactly?’ said Lady Helen eagerly.

‘Exactly,’ he said, standing still.

Lady Charlotte looked at him significantly. But he would not see her look.

‘Lady Charlotte, where is my sister?’ said Rose, coming up from the back room, looking now nearly as white as her dress.

It appeared that Agnes had just been carried off by a lady who lived on Campden Hill close to the Leyburns, and who had been obliged to go at the beginning of the last experiment. Agnes, torn between her interest in what was going on and her desire to get back to her mother, had at last hurriedly accepted this Mrs. Sherwood’s offer of a seat in her carriage, imagining that her sister would want to stay a good deal later, and relying on Lady Charlotte’s promise that she should be safely put into a hansom.

‘I must go,’ said Rose, putting her hand to her head. How tiring this is! How long did it take, Mr. Flaxman?’

‘Exactly three minutes’ he said, his gaze fixed upon her with an expression that only Lady Helen noticed.

‘So little! Good-night, Lady Charlotte!’ and giving her hand first to her hostess, then to Mr. Flaxman’s bewildered sister, she moved away into the crowd.

‘Hugh, of course you are going down with her?’ exclaimed Lady Charlotte under her breath. ‘You must. I promised to see her safely off the promises.’

He stood immovable. Lady Helen with a reproachful look made a step forward, but he caught her arm.

‘Don’t spoil sport,’ he said, in a tone which, amid the hum of discussion caused by the experiment, was heard only by his aunt and sister.

They looked at him–the one amazed, the other grimly observant–and caught a slight significant motion of the head toward Langham’s distant figure.

Langham came up and made his farewells. As he turned his back, Lady Helen’s large astonished eyes followed him to the door.

‘Oh Hugh!’ was all she could say as they came back to her brother.

‘Never mind, Nellie,’ he whispered, touched by the bewildered sympathy of her look; ‘I will tell you all about it to-morrow. I have not been behaving well, and am not particularly pleased with myself. But for her it is all right. Poor, pretty little thing!’

And he walked away into the thick of the conversation.

Downstairs the hall was already full of people waiting for their carriages. Langham, hurrying down, saw Rose coming out of the cloak-room, muffled up in brown furs, a pale, child-like fatigue in her looks which set his heart beating faster than ever.

‘Miss Leyburn, how are you going home?’

‘Will you ask for a hansom, please?’

‘Take my arm,’ he said, and she clung to him through the crush till they reached the door.

Nothing but private carriages were in sight. The street seemed blocked, a noisy tumult of horses and footmen and shouting men with lanterns. Which of them suggested, ‘Shall we walk a few steps?’ At any rate, here they were, out in the wind and the darkness, every step carrying them farther away from that moving patch of noise and light behind.

‘We shall find a cab at once in Park Lane,’ he said. ‘Are you warm?’

‘Perfectly.’

A fur hood fitted round her face, to which the color was coming back. She held her cloak tightly round her, and her little feet, fairly well shod, slipped in and out on the dry frosty pavement.

Suddenly they passed a huge unfinished house, the building of which was being pushed on by electric light. The great walls, ivory white in the glare, rose into the purply-blue of the starry February sky, and as they passed within the power of the lamps each saw with noonday distinctness every line and feature in the other’s face. They swept on-the night, with its alternations of flame and shadow, an unreal and enchanted world about them. A space of darkness succeeded the space of daylight. Behind them in the distance was the sound of hammers and workmen’s voices; before them the dim trees of the park. Not a human being was in sight. London seemed to exist to be the mere dark friendly shelter of this wandering of theirs.

A blast of wind blew her cloak out of her grasp. But before she could close it again, an arm was flung around her. Should not speak or move, she stood passive, conscious only of the strangeness of the wintry wind, and of this warm breast against which her cheek was laid.

‘Oh, stay there!’ a voice said close to her ear. ‘Rest there–pale tired child–pale tired little child!’

That moment seemed to last an eternity. He held her close, cherishing and protecting her from the cold–not kissing her–till at length she looked up with bright eyes, shining through happy tears.

‘Are you sure at last?’ she said, strangely enough, speaking out of the far depths of her own thought to his.

‘Sure!’ he said, his expression changing. ‘What can I be sure of? I am sure that I am not worth your loving, sure that I am poor, insignificant, obscure, that if you give yourself to me you will be miserably throwing yourself away!’

She looked at him, still smiling, a white sorceress weaving spells about him in the darkness. He drew her lightly gloved hand through his arm, holding the fragile fingers close in his, and they moved on.

‘Do you know,’ he repeated–a tone of intense melancholy replacing the tone of passion-‘how little I have to give you?’

‘I know,’ she answered, her face turned shly away from him, her words coming from under the fur hood which had fallen forward a little. ‘I know that-that–you are not rich, that you distrust yourself, that—-‘

‘Oh, hush,’ he said, and his voice was full of pain. ‘You know so little; let me paint myself. I have lived alone, for myself, in myself, till sometimes there seems to be hardly anything left in me to love or be loved; nothing but a brain, a machine that exists only for certain selfish ends. My habits are the tyrants of years; and at Murewell, though I loved you there, they were strong enough to carry me away from you. There is something paralyzing in me, which is always forbidding me to feel, to will. Sometimes I think it is an actual physical disability–the horror that is in me of change, of movement, of effort. Can you bear with me? Can you be poor? Can you live a life of monotony? Oh, impossible!’ he broke out, almost putting her hand away from him. ‘You, who ought to be a queen of this world, for whom everything bright and brilliant is waiting if you will but stretch out your hand to it. It is a crime–an infamy–that I should be speaking to you like this!’

Rose raised her head. A passing light shone upon her. She was trembling and pale again, but her eyes were unchanged.

‘No, no,’ she said wistfully; ‘not if you love me.’

He hung above her, an agony of feeling in the fine rigid face, of which the beautiful features and surfaces were already worn and blanched by the life of thought. What possessed him was not so much distrust of circumstance as doubt, hideous doubt, of himself, of this very passion beating within him. She saw nothing, meanwhile, but the self-depreciation which she knew so well in him, and against which her love in its rash ignorance and generosity cried out.

‘You will not say you love me!’ she cried, with hurrying breath. ‘But I know–I know–you do.’

Then her courage sinking, ashamed, blushing, once more turning away from him–‘At least, if you don’t, I am very–very–unhappy.’

The soft words flew through his blood. For an instant he felt himself saved, like Faust,–saved by the surpassing moral beauty of one moment’s impression. That she should need him, that his life should matter to hers! They were passing the garden wall of a great house. In the deepest shadow of it, he stooped suddenly and kissed her.

CHAPTER XXXVI.

Langham parted with Rose at the corner of Martin Street. She would not let him take her any farther.

‘I will say nothing,’ she whispered to him, as he put her into a passing hansom, wrapping her cloak warmly round her, ’till I see you again. To-morrow?’

‘To-morrow morning,’ he said, waving his hand to her, and in another instant he was facing the north wind alone.

He walked on fast toward Beaumont Street, but by the time he reached his destination midnight had struck. He made his way into his room where the fire was still smouldering, and striking a light, sank into his large reading chair, beside which the volumes used in the afternoon 1ay littered on the floor.

He was suddenly penetrated with the cold of the night, and hung shivering over the few embers which still glowed. What had happened to him? In this room, in this chair, the self-forgetting excitement of that walk, scarcely half an hour old, seems to him already long past–incredible almost.

And yet the brain was still full of images, the mind still full of a hundred new impressions. That fair head against his breast, those soft confiding words, those yielding lips. Ah! it is the poor, silent, insignificant student that has conquered. It is he, not the successful man of the world, that has held that young and beautiful girl in his arms, and heard from her the sweetest and humblest confession of love. Fate can have neither wit nor conscience to have ordained it so; but fate has so ordained it. Langham takes note of his victory, takes dismal note also, that the satisfaction of it has already half departed.

So the great moment has come and gone! The one supreme experience which life and his own will had so far rigidly denied him, is his. He has felt the torturing thrill of passion–he has evoked such an answer as all men might envy him,–and fresh from Rose’s kiss, from Rose’s beauty, the strange maimed soul falls to a pitiless analysis of his passion, her response! One moment he is at her feet in a voiceless trance of gratitude and tenderness; the next–is nothing what it promises to be?–and has the boon already, now that he has it in his grasp, lost some of its beauty, just as the sea-shell drawn out of the water, where its lovely iridescence tempted eye and hand, loses half its fairy charm?

The night wore on. Outside an occasional cab or cart would rattle over the stones of the street, an occasional voice or step would penetrate the thin walls of the house, bringing a shock of sound into that silent upper room. Nothing caught Langham’s ear. He was absorbed in the dialogue which was to decide his life.

Opposite to him, as it seemed, there sat a spectral reproduction of himself, his true self, with whom he held a long and ghastly argument.

‘But I love her!–I love her! A little courage–a little effort–and I too can achieve what other men achieve. I have gifts, great gifts. Mere contact with her, the mere necessities of the situation, will drive me back to life, teach me how to live normally, like other men. I have not forced her love–it has been a free gift. Who can blame me if I take it, if I cling to it, as the man freezing in a crevasse clutches the rope thrown to him?’

To which the pale spectre self said scornfully–

‘_Courage_ and _effort_ may as well be dropped out of your vocabulary. They are words that you have no use for. Replace them by two others–_habit_ and _character_. Slave as you are of habit, of the character you have woven for yourself–out of years of deliberate living–what wild unreason to imagine that love can unmake, can re-create! What you are, you are to all eternity. Bear your own burden, but for God’s sake beguile no other human creature into trusting you with theirs!’

‘But she loves me! Impossible that I should crush and tear so kind, so warm a heart! Poor child–poor child! I have played on her pity. I have won all she had to give. And now to throw her gift back in her face–oh monstrous–oh inhuman!’ and the cold drops stood on his forhead.

But the other self was inexorable. ‘You have acted as you were bound to act–as any man may be expected to act in whom will and manhood and true human kindness are dying out, poisoned by despair and the tyranny of the critical habit. But at least do not add another crime to the first. What in God’s name have you to offer a creature of such claims, such ambitions? You are poor–you must go back to Oxford–you must take up the work your soul loathes–grow more soured, more embittered–maintain a useless degrading struggle, till her youth is done, her beauty wasted, and till you yourself have lost every shred of decency and dignity, even that decorous outward life in which you can still wrap yourself from the world! Think of the little house–the children–the money difficulties–she, spiritually starved, every illusion gone,–you incapable soon of love, incapable even of pity, conscious only of a dull rage with her, yourself, the world! Bow the neck–submit–refuse that long agony for yourself and her, while there is still time. _Kismet!–Kismet!_’

And spread out before Langham’s shrinking soul there lay a whole dismal Hogarthian series, image leading to image, calamity to calamity, till in the last scene of all the maddened inward sight perceived two figures, two gray and withered figures, far apart, gazing at each other with old and sunken eyes across dark rivers of sordid irremediable regret.

The hours passed away, and in the end, the spectre self, cold and bloodless conqueror, slipped back into the soul which remorse and terror, love and pity, a last impulse of hope, a last stirring of manhood, had been alike powerless to save.

The February dawn was just beginning when he dragged himself to a table and wrote.

Then for hours afterward he sat sunk in his chair, the stupor of fatigue broken every now and then by a flash of curious introspection. It was a base thing which he had done–it was also a strange thing psychologically–and at intervals he tried to understand it–to track it to its causes.

At nine o’clock he crept out into the frosty daylight, found a commissionaire who was accustomed to do errands for him, and sent him with a letter to Lerwick Gardens.

On his way back he passed a gunsmith’s, and stood looking fascinated at the shining barrels. Then he moved away, shaking his head, his eyes gleaming as though the spectacle of himself had long ago passed the bounds of tragedy–become farcical even.

‘I should only stand a month–arguing–with my finger on the trigger.’

In the little hall his landlady met him, gave a start at the sight of him, and asked him if he ailed and if she could do anything for him. He gave her a sharp answer and went upstairs, where she heard him dragging books and boxes about as though he were packing.

A little later Rose was standing at the dining-room window of No. 27, looking on to a few trees bedecked with rime which stood outside. The ground and roofs were white, a promise of sun was struggling through the fog. So far everything in these unfrequented Campden Hill roads was clean, crisp, enlivening, and the sparkle in Rose’s mood answered to that of nature.

Breakfast had just been cleared away. Agnes was upstairs with Mrs. Leyburn. Catherine, who was staying in the house for a day or two, was in a chair by the fire, reading some letters forwarded to her from Bedford Square.

He would appear some time in the morning, she supposed. With an expression half rueful, half amused, she fell to imagining his interview, with Catherine, with her mother. Poor Catherine! Rose feels herself happy enough to allow herself a good honest pang of remorse for much of her behavior to Catherine this winter; how thorny she has been, how unkind often, to this sad changed sister. And now this will be a fresh blow! ‘But afterward, when she has got over it–when she knows that it makes me happy,–that nothing else would make me happy,–then she will be reconciled, and she and I perhaps will make friends, all over again, from the beginning. I won’t be angry or hard over it–poor Cathie!’

And with regard to Mr. Flaxman. As she stands there waiting idly for what destiny may send her, she puts herself through a little light catechism about this other friend of hers. He had behaved somewhat oddly toward her of late; she begins now to remember that her exit from Lady Charlotte’s house the night before had been a very different matter from the royally attended leave takings, presided over by Mr. Flaxman, which generally befell her there. Had he understood? With a little toss of her head she said to herself that she did not care if it was so. ‘I have never encouraged Mr. Flaxman to think I was going to marry him.’

But of course Mr. Flaxman will consider she has done badly for herself. So will Lady Charlotte and all her outer world. They will say she is dismally throwing herself away, and her mother, no doubt influenced by the clamor, will take up very much the same line.

What matter! The girl’s spirit seemed to rise against all the world. There was a sort of romantic exaltation in her sacrifice of herself, a jubilant looking forward to remonstrance, a wilful determination to overcome it. That she was about to do the last thing she could have been expected to do, gave her pleasure. Almost all artistic faculty goes with a love of surprise and caprice in life. Rose had her full share of the artistic love for the impossible and the difficult.

Besides–success! To make a man hope and love, and live again–_that_ shall be her success. She leaned against the window, her eyes filling, her heart very soft.

Suddenly she saw a commissionaire coming up the little flagged passage to the door. He gave in a note, and immediately afterward the dining-room door opened.

‘A letter for you, Miss,’ said the maid.

Rose took it–glanced at the hand-writing. A bright flush–a surreptitious glance at Catherine, who sat absorbed in a wandering letter from, Mrs. Darcy. Then the girl carried her prize to the window and opened it.

Catherine read on, gathering up, the Murewell names and details as some famished gleaner might gather up the scattered ears on a plundered field. At last something in the silence of the room, and of the other inmate in it, struck her.

‘Rose,’ she said, looking up, ‘was that someone brought you a note?’

The girl turned with a start–a letter fell to the ground. She made a faint ineffectual effort to pick it up, and sank into a chair.

‘Rose–darling!’ cried Catherine, springing up, ‘are you ill?’

Rose looked at her with a perfectly colorless fixed face, made a feeble negative sign, and then laying her arms on the breakfast-table in front of her, let her head fall upon them.

Catherine stood over her aghast. ‘My darling–what is it? Come and lie down–take this water.’

She put some close to her sister’s hand, but Rose pushed it away. ‘Don’t talk to me, ‘she said, with difficulty.

Catherine knelt beside her in helpless pain and perplexity, her cheek resting against her sister’s shoulder as a mute sign of sympathy. What could be the matter? Presently her gaze travelled from Rose to the letter on the floor. It lay with the address uppermost, and she at once recognized Langham’s handwriting. But before she could combine any rational ideas with this quick perception, Rose had partially mastered herself. She raised her head slowly and grasped her sister’s arm.

‘I was startled,’ she said, a forced smile on her white lips. ‘Last night Mr. Langham asked me to marry him–I expected him here this morning to consult with mamma and you. That letter is to inform me that–he made a mistake–and he was very sorry! So am I! It is so–so–bewildering!’

She got up restlessly and went to the fire as though shivering with cold. Catherine thought she hardly knew what she was saying. The older sister followed her, and throwing an arm round her pressed the slim irresponsive figure close. Her eyes were bright with anger, her lips quivering.

‘That he should _dare!_’ she cried. ‘Rose–my poor little Rose?’

‘Don’t blame him!’ said Rose, crouching down before the fire, while Catherine fell into the arm-chair again. ‘It doesn’t seem to count, from you–you have always been so ready to blame him!’

Her brow contracted–she looked frowning into the fire–her still colorless mouth working painfully.

Catherine was cut to the heart. ‘Oh Rose!’ she said, holding out her hands, ‘I will blame no one, dear, I seem hard–but I love you so. Oh, tell me–you would have told we everything once!’

There was the most painful yearning in her tone. Rose lifted a listless right hand and put it into her sister’s out-stretched palms. But she made no answer, till suddenly, with a smothered cry, she fell toward Catherine.

‘Catherine! I cannot bear it. I said I loved him–he kissed me–I could kill myself and him.’

Catherine never forgot the mingled tragedy and domesticity of the hour that followed–the little familiar morning sounds in and about the house, maids running up and down stairs, tradesmen calling, bells ringing–and here, at her feet, a spectacle of moral and mental struggle which she only half understood, but which wrung her inmost heart. Two strains of feeling seemed to be present in Rose–a sense of shook, of wounded pride, of intolerable humiliation–and a strange intervening passion of pity, not for herself but for Langham, which seemed to have been stirred in her by his letter. But though the elder questioned, and the younger seemed to answer, Catherine could hardly piece the story together, nor could she find the answer to the question filling her own indignant heart, ‘Does she love him?’

At last Rose got up from her crouching position by the fire and stood, a white ghost of herself, pushing back the bright encroaching hair from eyes that were dry and feverish.

‘If I could only be angry,–downright angry,’ she said, more to herself than Catherine–‘it would do one good.’

‘Give others leave to be angry for you!’ cried Catherine.

‘Don’t!’ said Rose, almost fiercely drawing herself away. ‘You don’t know. It is a fate. Why did we ever meet? You may read his letter; you must–you misjudge him–you always have. No, no’–and she nervously crushed the letter in her hand–‘not yet. But you shall read it some time–you and Robert too. Married people always tell one another. It is due to him, perhaps due to me too,’ and a hot flush transfigured her paleness for an instant. ‘Oh, my head! Why does one’s mind effect one’s body like this? It shall not–it is humiliating! “Miss Leyburn has been jilted and cannot see visitors,”–that is the kind of thing. Catherine, when you have finished that document, will you kindly come and hear me practise my last Raff?–I am going. Good-by.’

She moved to the door, but Catherine had only just time to catch her, or she would have fallen over a chair from sudden giddiness.

‘Miserable!’ she said, dashing a tear from her eyes, ‘I must go and lie down then in the proper missish fashion. Mind, on your peril, Catherine, not a word to anyone but Robert. I shall tell Agnes.