e
should any of us go to perdition even if Catherine did marry. And what a
wretch I am to think so after last night! Oh dear, I wish she'd let me
do something for her; I wish she'd ask me to black her boots for her, or
put in her tuckers, or tidy her drawers for her, or anything worse
still, and I'd do it and welcome!'

It was getting uncomfortably serious all round, Rose admitted. But there
was one element of comedy besides Mrs. Thornburgh, and that was Mrs.
Leyburn's unconsciousness.

'Mamma is too good,' thought the girl, with a little ripple of laughter.
'She takes it as a matter of course that all the world should admire us,
and she'd scorn to believe that anybody did it from interested motives.'

Which was perfectly true. Mrs. Leyburn was too devoted to her daughters
to feel any fidgety interest in their marrying. Of course the most
eligible persons would be only too thankful to marry them when the
moment came. Meanwhile her devotion was in no need of the confirming
testimony of lovers. It was sufficient in itself, and kept her mind
gently occupied from morning till night. If it had occurred to her to
notice that Robert Elsmere had been paying special attentions to any one
in the family, she would have suggested with perfect _naivete_ that it
was herself. For he had been to her the very pink of courtesy and
consideration, and she was of opinion that 'poor Richard's views' of the
degeneracy of Oxford men would have been modified could he have seen
this particular specimen.

Later on in the morning Rose had been out giving Bob a run, while Agnes
drove with her mother. On the way home she overtook Elsmere returning
from an errand for the vicar.

'It is not so bad,' she said to him, laughing, pointing to the sky; 'we
really might have gone.'

'Oh, it would have been cheerless,' he said simply. His look of
depression amazed her. She felt a quick movement of sympathy, a wild
wish to bid him cheer up and fight it out. If she could just have shown
him Catherine as she looked last night! Why couldn't she talk it out
with him? Absurd conventions! She had half a mind to try.

But the grave look of the man beside her deterred even her young
half-childish audacity.

'Catherine will have a good day for all her business,' she said
carelessly.

He assented quietly. Oh, after that hand-shake on the bridge yesterday
she could not stand it,--she must give him a hint how the land lay.

'I suppose she will spend the after