her head.

'What!' cried Mrs. Thornburgh; then, with charming inconsistency, 'oh,
you can't know anything in two days.'

'That's just it,' said Agnes, intervening; 'we can't know anything in
two days. No one ever will know anything about Catherine, if she takes
to anybody, till the last minute.'

Mrs. Thornburgh's face fell. 'It's very difficult when people will be so
reserved,' she said dolefully.

The girls acquiesced, but intimated that they saw no way out of it.

'At any rate we can bring them together,' she broke out, brightening
again. 'We can have picnics, you know, and teas, and all that--and
watch. Now listen.'

And the vicar's wife sketched out a programme of festivities for the
next fortnight she had been revolving in her inventive head, which took
the sisters' breath away. Rose bit her lip to keep in her laughter.
Agnes with vast self-possession took Mrs. Thornburgh in hand. She
pointed out firmly that nothing would be so likely to make Catherine
impracticable as fuss. 'In vain is the net spread,' etc. She preached
from the text with a worldly wisdom which quickly crushed Mrs.
Thornburgh.

'Well, _what_ am I to do, my dears?' she said at last helplessly. 'Look
at the weather! We must have some picnics, if it's only to amuse
Robert.'

Mrs. Thornburgh spent her life between a condition of effervescence and
a condition of feeling the world too much for her. Rose and Agnes,
having now reduced her to the latter state, proceeded cautiously to give
her her head again. They promised her two or three expeditions and one
picnic at least; they said they would do their best; they promised they
would report what they saw and be very discreet, both feeling the comedy
of Mrs. Thornburgh as the advocate of discretion; and then they departed
to their early dinner, leaving the vicars wife decidedly less
self-confident than they found her.

'The first matrimonial excitement of the family,' cried Agnes as they
walked home. 'So far no one can say the Miss Leyburns have been
besieged!'

'It will be all moonshine,' Rose replied decisively. 'Mr. Elsmere may
lose his heart; we may aid and abet him; Catherine will live in the
clouds for a few weeks, and come down from them at the end with the air
of an angel, to give him his _coup de grace_. As I said before--poor
fellow!'

Agnes made no answer. She was never so positive as Rose, and on the
whole did not find herself the worse for it in life. Besides, she
understood t