dle Ages. She was not conscious of change, but change there
was. She had, in fact, undergone that dissociation of the moral judgment
from a special series of religious formulae which is the crucial, the
epoch-making fact of our day. 'Unbelief,' says the orthodox preacher,
'is sin, and implies it': and while he speaks, the saint in the
unbeliever gently smiles down his argument, and suddenly, in the rebel
of yesterday men see the rightful heir of to-morrow.

CHAPTER XLVII

Meanwhile the Leyburns were at Burwood again. Rose's summer, indeed, was
much varied by visits to country houses--many of them belonging to
friends and acquaintances of the Flaxman family--by concerts, and the
demands of several new and exciting artistic friendships. But she was
seldom loth to come back to the little bare valley and the gray-walled
house. Even the rain which poured down in August, quite unabashed by any
consciousness of fine weather elsewhere, was not as intolerable to her
as in past days.

The girl was not herself; there was visible in her not only that general
softening and deepening of character which had been the consequence of
her trouble in the spring, but a painful _ennui_ she could hardly
disguise, a longing for she knew not what. She was beginning to take the
homage paid to her gift and her beauty with a quiet dignity, which was
in no sense false modesty, but implied a certain clearness of vision,
curious and disquieting in so young and dazzling a creature. And when
she came home from her travels she would develop a taste for long
walks, breasting the mountains in rain or sun, penetrating to their
austerest solitudes alone, as though haunted by that profound saying of
Obermann, 'Man is not made for enjoyment only--_la tristesse fait aussi
partie de ses vastes besoins_.'

What, indeed, was it that ailed her? In her lonely moments, especially
in those moments among the high fells, beside some little tarn or
streamlet, while the sheets of mist swept by her, or the great clouds
dappled the spreading sides of the hills, she thought often of
Langham--of that first thrill of passion which had passed through her,
delusive and abortive, like one of those first thrills of spring which
bring out the buds, only to provide victims for the frost. Now with her
again 'a moral east wind was blowing.' The passion was gone. The thought
of Langham still roused in her a pity that seemed to strain at her
heartstrings. But was it really