er feet, sorting
silks, and beads, and Berlin wool, and Rose was above casting even a
glance at them. Captain Danton, Sir Ronald, and the Doctor were playing
billiards at the other end of the rambling old house. And upstairs poor
Agnes Darling tossed feverishly on her hot pillow, and moaned, and slept
fitfully, and murmured a name in her troubled sleep, and Grace watching
her, and listening, heard the name "Harry."

Some of the gloom of the wretched day seemed to play on Rose's spirits.
She sang all the melancholy songs she knew, in a mournful, minor key,
until the conversation of the other two ceased, and they felt as dismal
as herself.

"Rose, don't!" Kate cried out in desperation at length. "Your songs are
enough to give one the horrors. Here is Reginald with a face as gloomy
as the day."

Rose got up in displeased silence, closed the piano, and walked to the
door.

"Pray don't!" said Stanford; "don't leave us. Kate and I have nothing
more to say to one another, and I have a thousand things to say to you."

"You must defer them, I fear," replied Rose. "Kate will raise your
spirits with more enlivening music when I am gone."

"A good idea," said Kate's lover, when the door closed; "come, my dear
girl, give us something a little less depressing than that we have just
been favoured with."

"How odd," said Kate languidly, "that Rose will not like you. I cannot
understand it."

"Neither can I," replied Mr. Stanford; "but since the gods have willed
it so, why, there is nothing for it but resignation. Here is 'Through
the woods, through the woods, follow and find me.' Sing that."

Kate essayed, but failed. Her headache was worse, and singing an
impossibility.

"I am afraid I must lie down," she said. "I am half blind with the pain.
You must seek refuge in the billiard-room, Reginald, while I go
upstairs."

Mr. Stanford expressed his regrets, kissed her hand--he was very calm
and decorous with his stately lady-love--and let her go.

"I wish Rose had stayed," he thought; "poor little girl! how miserable
she does look sometimes. I am afraid I have not acted quite right; and I
don't know that I am not going to make a scoundrel of myself; but how is
a fellow to help it? Kate's too beautiful and too perfect for mortal
man; and I am very mortal, indeed, and should feel uncomfortable married
to perfection."

He walked to the curtained recess of the drawing-room, where Rose had
one morning battled with her despair,