portance? Rose vowed to herself
that she needed no reminder of that station whereunto it had pleased God
to call her, and that Lady Charlotte might spare herself all those
anxieties and reluctances which the girl's quick sense detected, in
spite of the invitations so freely showered on Lerwick Gardens.

The end of it all was that Hugh Flaxman found himself again driven into
a corner. At the bottom of him was still a confidence that would not
yield. Was it possible that he had ever given her some tiny involuntary
glimpse of it, and that but for that glimpse she would have let him make
his peace much more easily? At any rate, now he felt himself at the end
of his resources.

'I must change the venue,' he said to himself; 'decidedly I must change
the venue.'

So by the end of June he had accepted an invitation to fish in Norway
with a friend, and was gone. Rose received the news with a callousness
which made even Lady Helen want to shake her.

On the eve of his journey, however, Hugh Flaxman had at last confessed
himself to Catherine and Robert. His obvious plight made any further
scruples on their part futile, and what they had they gave him in the
way of sympathy. Also Robert, gathering that he already knew much, and
without betraying any confidence of Rose's, gave him a hint or two on
the subject of Langham. But more not the friendliest mortal could do for
him, and Flaxman went off into exile announcing to a mocking Elsmere
that he should sit pensive on the banks of Norwegian rivers till fortune
had had time to change.

BOOK VII

GAIN AND LOSS

CHAPTER XLVI

A hot July had well begun, but still Elsmere was toiling on in Elgood
Street, and could not persuade himself to think of a holiday. Catherine
and the child he had driven away more than once, but the claims upon
himself were becoming so absorbing he did not know how to go even for a
few weeks. There were certain individuals in particular who depended on
him from day to day. One was Charles Richards's widow. The poor
desperate creature had put herself abjectly into Elsmere's hands. He had
sent her to an asylum, where she had been kindly and skilfully treated,
and after six weeks' abstinence she had just returned to her children,
and was being watched by himself and a competent woman neighbour, whom
he had succeeded in interesting in the case.

Another was a young 'secret springer,' to use the mysterious terms of
the trade--Robson by name--w