ourless 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 me everything once!'

There was the most painful yearning in her tone. Rose lifted a listless
right hand and put it into her sister's outstretched palms. But she made
no answer, till suddenly, with a smothered cry, she fell towards
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
shock, 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 affect 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-bye.'