ay
the most unpleasant things you can think of--it was a great success.
I know the Leyburns enjoyed it. And as for Robert, I saw him
_looking_--_looking_ at that little minx Rose while she was playing as
if he couldn't take his eyes off her. What a picture she made, to be
sure!'

The vicar, who had been standing with his back to the fireplace and his
hands in his pockets, received his wife's remarks first of all with
lifted eyebrows, and then with a low chuckle, half scornful, half
compassionate, which made her start in her chair.

'Rose?' he said impatiently. 'Rose, my dear, where were your eyes?'

It was very rarely indeed that on her own ground, so to speak, the vicar
ventured to take the whip-hand of her like this. Mrs. Thornburgh looked
at him in amazement.

'Do you mean to say,' he asked, in raised tones, 'that you didn't notice
that from the moment you first introduced Robert to Catherine Leyburn,
he had practically no attention for anybody else?'

Mrs. Thornburgh gazed at him--her memory flew back over the evening--and
her impulsive contradiction died on her lips. It was now her turn to
ejaculate--

'Catherine!' she said feebly. 'Catherine! how absurd!'

But she turned and, with quickened breath, looked out of [the] window
after the retreating figures. Mrs. Thornburgh went up to bed that night
an inch taller. She had never felt herself more exquisitely
indispensable, more of a personage.

CHAPTER IV

Before, however, we go on to chronicle the ultimate success or failure
of Mrs. Thornburgh as a match-maker, it may be well to inquire a little
more closely into the antecedents of the man who had suddenly roused so
much activity in her contriving mind. And, indeed, these antecedents are
important to us. For the interest of an uncomplicated story will
entirely depend upon the clearness with which the reader may have
grasped the general outlines of a quick soul's development. And this
development had already made considerable progress before Mrs.
Thornburgh set eyes upon her husband's cousin, Robert Elsmere.

Robert Elsmere, then, was well born and fairly well provided with this
world's goods; up to a certain moderate point, indeed, a favourite of
fortune in all respects. His father belonged to the younger line of an
old Sussex family, and owed his pleasant country living to the family
instincts of his uncle, Sir William Elsmere, in whom Whig doctrines and
Conservative traditions were pretty evenl