t
where and what they were last year. I admit they are born and die, but
they do nothing else of a decisive kind.'

Catherine's hands worked away for a while, then she laid down her book
and said, lifting her clear large eyes on her sister,--

'Was there _never_ a time when you loved the valley, Rose?'

'Never!' cried Rose.

Then she pushed away her work, and leaning her elbows on the table
turned her brilliant face to Catherine. There was frank mutiny in it.

'By the way, Catherine, are you going to prevent mamma from letting me
go to Berlin for the winter?'

'And after Berlin, Rose?' said Catherine, presently, her gaze bent upon
her work.

'After Berlin? What next?' said Rose recklessly. 'Well, after Berlin I
shall try to persuade mamma and Agnes, I suppose, to come and back me up
in London. We could still be some months of the year at Burwood.'

Now she had said it out. But there was something else surely goading the
girl than mere intolerance of the family tradition. The hesitancy, the
moral doubt of her conversation with Langham, seemed to have vanished
wholly in a kind of acrid self-assertion.

Catherine felt a shock sweep through her. It was as though all the
pieties of life, all the sacred assumptions and self-surrenders at the
root of it, were shaken, outraged by the girl's tone.

'Do you ever remember,' she said, looking up, while her voice trembled,
'what papa wished when he was dying?'

It was her last argument. To Rose she had very seldom used it in so many
words. Probably, it seemed to her too strong, too sacred, to be often
handled.

But Rose sprang up, and pacing the little workroom with her white wrists
locked behind her, she met that argument with all the concentrated
passion which her youth had for years been storing up against it.
Catherine sat presently overwhelmed, bewildered. This language of a
proud and tameless individuality, this modern gospel of the divine right
of self-development--her soul loathed it! And yet, since that night in
Marrisdale, there had been a new yearning in her to understand.

Suddenly, however, Rose stopped, lost her thread. Two figures were
crossing the lawn, and their shadows were thrown far beyond them by the
fast disappearing sun.

She threw herself down on her chair again with an abrupt--

'Do you see they have come back? We must go and dress.'

And as she spoke she was conscious of a new sensation altogether--the
sensation of the wild creature lass