near and hid her face upon
them. She was one bundle of jarring nerves--sore, poor passionate child,
that she was betraying herself; sorer still that, as she told herself,
Catherine was sending her to Berlin as a consolation. When girls have
love-troubles the first thing their elders do is to look for a
diversion. She felt sick and humiliated. Catherine had been talking her
over with the family, she supposed.

Meanwhile Catherine stood by her tenderly, stroking her hair and saying
soothing things.

'I am sure you will be happy at Berlin, Rose. And you mustn't leave me
out of your life, dear, though I am so stupid and unmusical. You must
write to me about all you do. We must begin a new time. Oh, I feel so
guilty sometimes,' she went on, falling into a low intensity of voice
that startled Rose, and made her look hurriedly up. 'I fought against
your music, I suppose, because I thought it was devouring you--leaving
no room for--for religion--for God. I was jealous of it for Christ's
sake. And all the time I was blundering! Oh, Rose,' and she sank on her
knees beside the chair, resting her head against the girl's shoulder,
'papa charged me to make you love God, and I torture myself with
thinking that, instead, it has been my doing, my foolish clumsy doing,
that you have come to think religion dull and hard. Oh, my darling, if I
could make amends--if I could get you not to love your art less but to
love it in God! Christ is the first reality; all things else are real
and lovely in Him. Oh, I have been frightening you away from Him! I
ought to have drawn you near. I have been so--so silent, so shut up, I
have never tried to make you feel what it was kept _me_ at His feet! Oh,
Rose, darling, you think the world real, and pleasure and enjoyment
real. But if I could have made you see and know the things I have seen
up in the mountains--among the poor, the dying--you would have _felt_
Him saving, redeeming, interceding, as I did. Oh, then you _must_, you
_would_ have known that Christ only is real, that our joys can only
truly exist in Him. I should have been more open--more faithful--more
humble.'

She paused with a long quivering sigh. Rose suddenly lifted herself, and
they fell into each other's arms.

Rose, shaken and excited, thought, of course, of that night at Burwood,
when she had won leave to go to Manchester. This scene was the sequel to
that--the next stage in one and the same process. Her feeling was much
the sam