n the edge of the bed, in a long glass
near, the only one of the kind which the rectory household possessed.
Rose sprang up, snatched at the candle, which was flickering in the air
of the open window, and stood erect before the glass, holding the candle
above her head.

What the light showed her was a slim form in a white dressing-gown, that
fell loosely about it; a rounded arm upstretched; a head, still crowned
with its jessamine wreath, from which the bright hair fell heavily over
shoulders and bosom; eyes, under frowning brows, flashing a proud
challenge at what they saw; two lips, 'indifferent red,' just open to
let the quick breath come through--all thrown into the wildest
chiaroscuro by the wavering candle flame.

Her challenge was answered. The fault was not there. Her arm dropped.
She put down the light.

'I _am_ handsome,' she said to herself, her mouth quivering childishly.
'I am. I may say it to myself.'

Then, standing by the window, she stared into the night. Her room, on
the opposite side of the house from Langham's, looked over the
cornfields and the distance. The stubbles gleamed faintly; the dark
woods, the clouds teased by the rising wind, sent a moaning voice to
greet her.

'I hate him! I hate him!' she cried to the darkness, clenching her cold
little hand.

Then presently she slipped on to her knees, and buried her head in the
bed-clothes. She was crying--angry stifled tears which had the hot
impatience of youth in them. It all seemed to her so untoward. This was
not the man she had dreamed of--the unknown of her inmost heart. _He_
had been young, ardent, impetuous like herself. Hand in hand, eye
flashing into eye, pulse answering to pulse, they would have flung aside
the veil hanging over life and plundered the golden mysteries behind it.

She rebels; she tries to see the cold alien nature which has laid this
paralysing spell upon her as it is, to reason herself back to peace--to
indifference. The poor child flies from her own half-understood
trouble; will none of it; murmurs again wildly--

'I hate him! I hate him! Cold-blooded--ungrateful--unkind!'

In vain. A pair of melancholy eyes haunt, enthral her inmost soul. The
charm of the denied, the inaccessible is on her, womanlike.

That old sense of capture, of helplessness, as of some lassoed
struggling creature, descended upon her. She lay sobbing there, trying
to recall what she had been a week before; the whirl of her London
visit, t