to read, or play with little Mary, in reality
recovering, like some bruised and trodden plant, under the healing
influence of thought and silence.

One day, when they were alone in the firelight, she startled Catherine
by saying with one of her old odd smiles--

'Do you know, Cathie, how I always see myself nowadays? It is a sort of
hallucination. I see a girl at the foot of a precipice. She has had a
fall, and she is sitting up, feeling all her limbs. And, to her great
astonishment, there is no bone broken!'

And she held herself back from Catherine's knee lest her sister should
attempt to caress her, her eyes bright and calm. Nor would she allow an
answer, drowning all that Catherine might have said in a sudden rush
after the child, who was wandering round them in search of a playfellow.

In truth, Rose Leyburn's girlish passion for Edward Langham had been a
kind of accident unrelated to the main forces of character. He had
crossed her path in a moment of discontent, of aimless revolt and
longing, when she was but fresh emerged from the cramping conditions of
her childhood and trembling on the brink of new and unknown activities.
His intellectual prestige, his melancholy, his personal beauty, his very
strangenesses and weaknesses, had made a deep impression on the girl's
immature romantic sense. His resistance had increased the charm, and the
interval of angry resentful separation had done nothing to weaken it. As
to the months in London, they had been one long duel between herself and
him--a duel which had all the fascination of difficulty and uncertainty,
but in which pride and caprice had dealt and sustained a large
proportion of the blows. Then, after a moment of intoxicating victory,
Langham's endangered habits and threatened individuality had asserted
themselves once for all. And from the whole long struggle--passion,
exultation, and crushing defeat--it often seemed to her that she had
gained neither joy nor irreparable grief, but a new birth of character,
a soul!

It may be easily imagined that Hugh Flaxman felt a peculiarly keen
interest in Langham's disappearance. On the afternoon of the Searle
House rehearsal he had awaited Rose's coming in a state of extraordinary
irritation. He expected a blushing _fiancee_, in a fool's paradise,
asking by manner, if not by word, for his congratulations, and taking a
decent feminine pleasure perhaps in the pang she might suspect in him.
And he had already taken his p