on be amply convinced of it
themselves, and meanwhile he should take his own way. And as for Rose,
they had no sooner turned back all three from the house to the garden
than she had divined everything in Catherine's mind, and set herself
against her sister with a wilful force in which many a past irritation
found expression.

How Catherine hated the music of that week! It seemed to her she never
opened the drawing-room door but she saw Langham at the piano, his head
with its crown of glossy, curling black hair, and his eyes lit with
unwonted gleams of laughter and sympathy, turned towards Rose, who was
either chatting wildly to him, mimicking the airs of some professional,
or taking off the ways of some famous teacher; or else, which was worse,
playing with all her soul, flooding the house with sound--now as soft
and delicate as first love, now as full and grand as storm waves on an
angry coast. And the sister going with compressed lip to her work-table
would recognise sorely that never had the girl looked so handsome, and
never had the lightnings of a wayward genius played so finely about her.

As to Langham, it may well be believed that after the scene in the
garden he had rated, satirised, examined himself in the most approved
introspective style. One half of him declared that scene to have been
the heights of melodramatic absurdity; the other thought of it with a
thrill of tender gratitude towards the young pitiful creature who had
evoked it. After all, why, because he was alone in the world and must
remain so, should he feel bound to refuse this one gift of the gods, the
delicate passing gift of a girl's--a child's friendship? As for her, the
man's very real, though wholly morbid, modesty scouted the notion of
love on her side. _He_ was a likely person for a beauty on the threshold
of life and success to fall in love with; but she meant to be kind to
him, and he smiled a little inward indulgent smile over her very evident
compassion, her very evident intention of reforming him, reconciling him
to life. And, finally, he was incapable of any further resistance. He
had gone too far with her. Let her do what she would with him, dear
child, with the sharp tongue and the soft heart, and the touch of genius
and brilliancy which made her future so interesting! He called his age
and his disillusions to the rescue; he posed to himself as stooping to
her in some sort of elder-brotherly fashion; and if every now and then
some