was already moving away.

'Try some other instead,' he said, smiling, his arm still upstretched.
'Robert has no lack of choice.' His manner had an animation and ease
usually quite foreign to it. Rose stopped, and her lips relaxed a
little.

'He is very nearly as bad as the novel-reading bishop, who was reduced
at last to stealing the servant's _Family Herald_ out of the kitchen
cupboard,' she said, a smile dawning.

Langham laughed.

'Has he such an episcopal appetite for them? That accounts for the fact
that when he and I begin to talk novels I am always nowhere.'

'I shouldn't have supposed you ever read them,' said Rose, obeying an
irresistible impulse, and biting her lip the moment afterwards.

'Do you think that we poor people at Oxford are always condemned to
works on the "enclitic [Greek: de]"?' he asked, his fine eyes lit up
with gaiety, and his head, of which the Greek outlines were ordinarily
so much disguised by his stoop and hesitating look, thrown back against
the books behind him.

Natures like Langham's, in which the nerves are never normal, have their
moments of felicity, balancing their weeks of timidity and depression.
After his melancholy of the last two days the tide of reaction had been
mounting within him, and the sight of Rose had carried it to its height.

She gave a little involuntary stare of astonishment. What had happened
to Robert's silent and finicking friend?

'I know nothing of Oxford,' she said a little primly, in answer to his
question. 'I never was there--but I never was anywhere, I have seen
nothing,' she added hastily, and, as Langham thought, bitterly.

'Except London, and the great world, and Madame Desforets!' he answered,
laughing. 'Is that so little?'

She flashed a quick defiant look at him, as he mentioned Madame
Desforets, but his look was imperturbably kind and gay. She could not
help softening towards him. What magic had passed over him?

'Do you know,' said Langham, moving, 'that you are standing in a
draught, and that it has turned extremely cold?'

For she had left the passage-door wide open behind her, and as the
window was partially open the curtains were swaying hither and thither,
and her muslin dress was being blown in coils round her feet.

'So it has,' said Rose, shivering. 'I don't envy the Church people. You
haven't found me a book, Mr. Langham?'

'I will find you one in a minute, if you will come and read it by the
fire,' he said, with his han