nd of calling
from the gate. She looked up and saw Robert waving to her. Evidently he
had just run up from the school to deliver a message. She hurried across
the drive to him and afterwards into the house, while he disappeared.

Rose got up from her perch on the armchair and would have followed, but
a movement of obstinacy or Quixotic wrath, or both, detained her.

'At any rate, Mr. Langham,' she said, drawing herself up, and speaking
with the most lofty accent, 'if you don't know anything personally about
Madame Desforets, I think it would be much fairer to say nothing--and
not to assume at once that all you hear is true!'

Langham had rarely felt more awkward than he did then, as he sat leaning
forward under the tree, this slim indignant creature standing over him,
and his consciousness about equally divided between a sense of her
absurdity and a sense of her prettiness.

'You are an advocate worth having, Miss Leyburn,' he said at last, an
enigmatical smile he could not restrain playing about his mouth. 'I
could not argue with you; I had better not try.'

Rose looked at him, at his dark regular face, at the black eyes which
were much vivider than usual, perhaps because they could not help
reflecting some of the irrepressible memories of Madame Desforets and
her _causes celebres_ which were coursing through the brain behind them,
and with a momentary impression of rawness, defeat, and yet involuntary
attraction, which galled her intolerably, she turned away and left him.

* * * * *

In the afternoon Robert was still unavailable, to his own great chagrin,
and Langham summoned up all his resignation and walked with the ladies.
The general impression left upon his mind by the performance was, first,
that the dust of an English August is intolerable, and, secondly, that
women's society ought only to be ventured on by the men who are made for
it. The views of Catherine and Rose may be deduced from his with
tolerable certainty.

But in the late afternoon, when they thought they had done their duty by
him, and he was again alone in the garden reading, he suddenly heard the
sounds of music.

Who was playing, and in that way? He got up and strolled past the
drawing-room window to find out.

Rose had got hold of an accompanist, the timid dowdy daughter of a local
solicitor, with some capacity for reading, and was now, in her lavish
impetuous fashion, rushing through a quantity of new m