ls than she has ever
been known to be, and then, at the end of it, just when everybody is
breathlessly awaiting the natural _denouement_, goes off to spend the
day that should have been the day of her betrothal in pottering about
orphan asylums, leaving everybody, but especially the poor young man, to
look ridiculous! No, Mrs. Thornburgh had no patience with her--none at
all. It was all because she would not be happy like anybody else, but
must needs set herself up to be peculiar. Why not live on a pillar, and
go into hair-shirts at once? Then the rest of the world would know what
to be at.

Meanwhile Rose was in no small excitement. While her mother and Elsmere
had been talking in the garden she had been discreetly waiting in the
back behind the angle of the house, and when she saw Elsmere walk off
she followed him with eager sympathetic eyes.

'Poor fellow!' she said to herself, but this time with the little tone
of patronage which a girl of eighteen, conscious of graces and good
looks, never shrinks from assuming towards an elder male, especially a
male in love with some one else. 'I wonder whether he thinks he knows
anything about Catherine.'

But her own feeling to-day was very soft and complex. Yesterday it had
been all hot rebellion. To-day it was all remorse and wondering
curiosity. What had brought Catherine into her room, with that white
face, and that bewildering change of policy? What had made her do this
brusque, discourteous thing to-day? Rose, having been delayed by the
loss of one of her goloshes in a bog, had been once near her and Elsmere
during that dripping descent from Shanmoor. They had been so clearly
absorbed in one another that she had fled on guiltily to Agnes, golosh
in hand, without waiting to put it on; confident, however, that neither
Elsmere nor Catherine had been aware of her little adventure. And at the
Shanmoor tea Catherine herself had discussed the picnic, offering, in
fact, to guide the party to a particular ghyll in High Fell, better
known to her than any one else.

'Oh, of course it's our salvation in this world and the next that's in
the way,' thought Rose, sitting crouched up in a grassy nook in the
garden, her shoulders up to her ears, her chin in her hands. 'I wish to
goodness Catherine wouldn't think so much about mine, at any rate. I
hate,' added this incorrigible young person--'I hate being the third
part of a "moral obstacle" against my will. I declare I don't believe w