indifferently.

Lady Charlotte raised her eyebrows. 'That dark, Byronic-looking creature
who came with you? I should not have imagined him capable of anything
sociable. Letitia, shall I send my maid to the rectory, or can you spare
a man?'

Mrs. Darcy hurriedly gave orders, and Rose, inwardly furious, was
obliged to submit. Then Lady Charlotte, having gained her point, and
secured a certain amount of diversion for the evening, lay back on the
sofa, used her fan, and yawned till the gentlemen appeared.

When they came in, the precious violin which Rose never trusted to any
other hands but her own without trepidation had just arrived, and its
owner, more erect than usual, because more nervous, was trying to prop
up a dilapidated music-stand which Mrs. Darcy had unearthed for her. As
Langham came in, she looked up and beckoned to him.

'Do you see?' she said to him impatiently, 'they have made me play.
Will you accompany me? I am very sorry, but there is no one else.'

If there was one thing Langham loathed on his own account, it was any
sort of performance in public. But the half-plaintive look which
accompanied her last words showed that she knew it, and he did his best
to be amiable.

'I am altogether at your service,' he said, sitting down with
resignation.

'It is all that tiresome woman, Lady Charlotte Wynnstay,' she whispered
to him behind the music-stand. 'I never saw such a person in my life.'

'Macaulay's Lady Holland without the brains,' suggested Langham with
languid vindictiveness as he gave her the note.

Meanwhile Mr. Wynnstay and the squire sauntered in together.

'A village Norman-Neruda?' whispered the guest to the host. The squire
shrugged his shoulders.

'Hush!' said Lady Charlotte, looking severely at her husband. Mr.
Wynnstay's smile instantly disappeared; he leant against the doorway and
stared sulkily at the ceiling. Then the musicians began, on some
Hungarian melodies put together by a younger rival of Brahms. They had
not played twenty bars before the attention of every one in the room was
more or less seized--unless we except Mr. Bickerton, whose children,
good soul, were all down with some infantile ailment or other, and who
was employed in furtively watching the clock all the time to see when it
would be decent to order round the pony-carriage which would take him
back to his pale overweighted spouse.

First came wild snatches of march music, primitive, savage,
non-European; then