gleam along the
edges of the river. On the grass commons between Murewell and Mile End
the birches rose like green clouds against the browns and purples of the
still leafless oaks and beeches. The birds were twittering and building.
Every day Robert was on the look-out for the swallows, or listening for
the first notes of the nightingale amid the bare spring coverts.

But the spring was less perfectly delightful to him than it might have
been, for Catherine was away. Mrs. Leyburn, who was to have come south
to them in February, was attacked by bronchitis instead at Burwood and
forbidden to move, even to a warmer climate. In March, Catherine,
feeling restless and anxious about her mother, and thinking it hard that
Agnes should have all the nursing and responsibility, tore herself from
her man and her baby, and went north to Whindale for a fortnight,
leaving Robert forlorn.

Now, however, she was in London, whither she had gone for a few days on
her way home, to meet Rose and to shop. Robert's opinion was that all
women, even St. Elizabeths, have somewhere rooted in them an inordinate
partiality for shopping; otherwise why should that operation take four
or five mortal days? Surely with a little energy, one might buy up the
whole of London in twelve hours! However, Catherine lingered, and as her
purchases were made, Robert crossly supposed it must be all Rose's
fault. He believed that Rose spent a great deal too much on dress.

Catherine's letters, of course, were full of her sister. Rose, she said,
had come back from Berlin handsomer than ever, and playing, she
supposed, magnificently. At any rate, the letters which followed her in
shoals from Berlin flattered her to the skies, and during the three
months preceding her return Joachim himself had taken her as a pupil and
given her unusual attention.

'And now, of course,' wrote Catherine, 'she is desperately disappointed
that mamma and Agnes cannot join her in town, as she had hoped. She does
her best, I know, poor child, to conceal it and to feel as she ought
about mamma, but I can see that the idea of an indefinite time at
Burwood is intolerable to her. As to Berlin, I think she has enjoyed it,
but she talks very scornfully of German _Schwaermerei_ and German women,
and she tells the oddest stories of her professors. With one or two of
them she seems to have been in a state of war from the beginning; but
some of them, my dear Robert, I am persuaded were just simply