k at him.

'The difficulty,' he exclaimed, 'is to know what to do with it!'

'Why do you make the difficulty? I gather she wants to study abroad.
What is there to prevent it?'

Langham turned to his companion with a touch of asperity. He could not
stand it that Elsmere should be so much narrowed and warped by that wife
of his, and her prejudices. Why should that gifted creature be cribbed,
cabined, and confined in this way?

'I grant you,' said Robert, with a look of perplexity, 'there is not
much to prevent it.'

And he was silent a moment, thinking, on his side, very tenderly of all
the antecedents and explanations of that old-world distrust of art and
the artistic life so deeply rooted in his wife, even though in practice
and under his influence she had made concession after concession.

'The great solution of all,' he said presently, brightening, 'would be
to get her married. I don't wonder her belongings dislike the notion of
anything so pretty and so flighty going off to live by itself. And to
break up the home in Whindale would be to undo everything their father
did for them, to defy his most solemn last wishes.'

'To talk of a father's wishes, in a case of this kind, ten years after
his death, is surely excessive?' said Langham with dry interrogation;
then, suddenly recollecting himself, 'I beg your pardon, Elsmere. I am
interfering.'

'Nonsense,' said Robert brightly, 'I don't wonder, it seems like a
difficulty of our own making. Like so many difficulties, it depends on
character, present character, bygone character----' And again he fell
musing on his Westmoreland experiences, and on the intensity of that
Puritan type it had revealed to him. 'However, as I said, marriage would
be the natural way out of it.'

'An easy way, I should think,' said Langham, after a pause.

'It won't be so easy to find the right man. She is a young person with a
future, is Miss Rose. She wants somebody in the stream; somebody with a
strong hand who will keep her in order and yet give her a wide range; a
rich man, I think--she hasn't the ways of a poor man's wife; but, at any
rate, some one who will be proud of her, and yet have a full life of his
own in which she may share.'

'Your views are extremely clear,' said Langham, and his smile had a
touch of bitterness in it. 'If hers agree, I prophesy you won't have
long to wait. She has beauty, talent, charm--everything that rich and
important men like.'

There was the sli