'How early you are, Robert!' she exclaimed, as the study door opened,
and Robert's wind-blown head and tall form, wrapped in an Inverness
cape, appeared on the threshold. 'Is Catherine tired?'

'Rather,' said Robert, the slightest gleam of surprise betraying itself
on his face. 'She has gone to bed, and told me to ask you to come and
say good-night to her.'

'You got my message about not coming from old Martha?' asked Rose. 'I
met her on the common.'

'Yes, she gave it us at the church door.' He went out again into the
passage to hang up his greatcoat. She followed, longing to tell him that
it was pure accident that took her to the study, but she could not find
words in which to do it, and could only say good-night a little
abruptly.

'How tempting that fire looks!' said Robert, re-entering the study.
'Were you very cold, Langham, before you lit it?'

'Very,' said Langham, smiling, his arm behind his head, his eyes fixed
on the blaze; 'but I have been delightfully warm and happy since.'

CHAPTER XIV

Catherine stopped beside the drawing-room window with a start, caught by
something she saw outside.

It was nothing, however, but the figures of Rose and Langham strolling
round the garden. A bystander would have been puzzled by the sudden
knitting of Catherine's brows over it.

Rose held a red parasol, which gleamed against the trees; Dandie leapt
about her, but she was too busy talking to take much notice of him.
Talking, chattering, to that cold cynic of a man, for whom only
yesterday she had scarcely had a civil word! Catherine felt herself a
prey to all sorts of vague unreasonable alarms.

Robert had said to her the night before, with an odd look: 'Wifie, when
I came in I found Langham and Rose had been spending the evening
together in the study. And I don't know when I have seen Langham so
brilliant or so alive as in our smoking talk just now!'

Catherine had laughed him to scorn; but, all the same, she had been a
little longer going to sleep than usual. She felt herself almost as much
as ever the guardian of her sisters, and the old sensitive nerve was set
quivering. And now there could be no question about it--Rose had changed
her ground towards Mr. Langham altogether. Her manner at breakfast was
evidence enough of it.

Catherine's self-torturing mind leapt on for an instant to all sorts of
horrors. _That_ man!--and she and Robert responsible to her mother and
her dead father! Never! Then she