,' she said despairingly. 'Papa
thought it wicked to care about anything except religion. If he had
lived, of course I should never have been allowed to study music. It has
been all mutiny so far, every bit of it, whatever I have been able to
do.'

'He would have changed with the times,' said Langham.

'I know he would,' cried Rose. 'I have told Catherine so a hundred
times. People--good people--think quite differently about art now, don't
they, Mr. Langham?'

She spoke with perfect _naivete_. He saw more and more of the child in
her, in spite of that one striking development of her art.

'They call it the handmaid of religion,' he answered, smiling.

Rose made a little face.

'I shouldn't,' she said, with frank brevity. 'But then there's something
else. You know where we live--at the very ends of the earth, seven miles
from a station, in the very loneliest valley of all Westmoreland. What's
to be done with a fiddle in such a place? Of course, ever since papa
died I've just been plotting and planning to get away. But there's the
difficulty,' and she crossed one white finger over another as she laid
out her case. 'That house where we live has been lived in by Leyburns
ever since--the Flood! Horrid set they were, I know, because I can't
ever make mamma or even Catherine talk about them. But still, when papa
retired, he came back and bought the old place from his brother. Such a
dreadful, dreadful mistake!' cried the child, letting her hands fall
over her knee.

'Had he been so happy there?'

'Happy!'--and Rose's lip curled. 'His brothers used to kick and cuff
him, his father was awfully unkind to him, he never had a day's peace
till he went to school, and after he went to school he never came back
for years and years and years, till Catherine was fifteen. What _could_
have made him so fond of it?'

And again looking despondently into the fire she pondered that far-off
perversity of her father's.

'Blood has strange magnetisms,' said Langham, seized as he spoke by the
pensive prettiness of the bent head and neck, 'and they show themselves
in the oddest ways.'

'Then I wish they wouldn't,' she said irritably. 'But that isn't all. He
went there, not only because he loved that place, but because he hated
other places. I think he must have thought'--and her voice dropped--'he
wasn't going to live long--he wasn't well when he gave up the
school--and then we could grow up there safe, without any chance of
getting