overtook her
till at the drawing-room door she paused with amazing dignity.

'Mamma,' she said, throwing it open, 'here is Mr. Flaxman. He is come
from Norway, and is on his way to Ullswater. I will go and speak to
Margaret about tea.'

CHAPTER XLVIII

After the little incident recorded at the end of the preceding chapter,
Hugh Flaxman may be forgiven if, as he walked home along the valley that
night towards the farmhouse where he had established himself, he
entertained a very comfortable scepticism as to the permanence of that
curious contract into which Rose had just forced him. However, he was
quite mistaken. Rose's maiden dignity avenged itself abundantly on Hugh
Flaxman for the injuries it had received at the hands of Langham. The
restraints, the anomalies, the hairsplittings of the situation delighted
her ingenuous youth. 'I am free--he is free. We will be friends for six
months. Possibly we may not suit one another at all. If we
do--_then_----'

In the thrill of that _then_ lay, of course, the whole attraction of the
position.

So that next morning Hugh Flaxman saw the comedy was to be scrupulously
kept up. It required a tolerably strong masculine certainty at the
bottom of him to enable him to resign himself once more to his part. But
he achieved it, and being himself a modern of the moderns, a lover of
half-shades and refinements of all sorts, he began very soon to enjoy
it, and to play it with an increasing cleverness and perfection.

How Rose got through Agnes's cross-questioning on the matter history
sayeth not. Of one thing, however, a conscientious historian may be
sure, namely, that Agnes succeeded in knowing as much as she wanted to
know. Mrs. Leyburn was a little puzzled by the erratic lines of Mr.
Flaxman's journeys. It was, as she said, curious that a man should start
on a tour through the Lakes from Long Whindale.

But she took everything naively as it came, and as she was told. Nothing
with her ever passed through any changing crucible of thought. It
required no planning to elude her. Her mind was like a stretch of wet
sand, on which all impressions are equally easy to make and equally
fugitive. He liked them all, she supposed, in spite of the comparative
scantiness of his later visits to Lerwick Gardens, or he would not have
come out of his way to see them. But as nobody suggested anything else
to her, her mind worked no further, and she was as easily beguiled after
his appearance