on as some people do; I just stop there with 'very fine.'"

"Cannot you pick out some passage which particularly struck you?"

"That is very true, is it not, that the mind can make a heaven of hell
and a hell of heaven?"

"Most true; but did you not notice the description of the music?"

Catharine was fond of music, but only as an expression of her own
feelings. For music as music--for a melody of Mozart, for example--that
is to say, for pure art, which is simply beauty, superior to our
personality, she did not care. She liked Handel, and there was a choral
society in Eastthorpe which occasionally performed the "Messiah."

"Don't you remember what Mr. Cardew said about it--it was remarkable that
Milton should have given to music the power to chase doubt from the mind,
doubt generally, and yet music is not argument?"

"Oh, yes, I recollect, but I do not quite comprehend him, and I told him
I did not see how music could make me sure of a thing if there was not a
reason for it."

"What did he say then?"

"Nothing."

Mr. Cardew called that evening to take his wife home. He was told that
she was in the garden with Miss Furze, and thither he at once went.

"Milton!" he exclaimed. "What are you doing with Milton here?"

"Miss Furze and I were reading the first book of the 'Paradise Lost'
together."

Mrs. Cardew looked at her husband inquiringly, and with a timid smile,
hoping he would show himself pleased. His brow, however, slightly
wrinkled itself with displeasure. He had told her to read Milton, had
said, "Fancy an Englishwoman with any pretensions to education not
knowing Milton!" and now, when she was doing exactly what she was
directed to do, he was vexed. He was annoyed to find he was precisely
obeyed, and perhaps would have been in a better temper if he had been
contradicted and resisted. Mrs. Cardew turned her head away. What was
she to do with him? Every one of her efforts to find the door had
failed.

"What has struck you particularly in that book, Miss Furze?"

Catharine was about to say something, but she caught sight of Mrs.
Cardew, and was arrested. At last she spoke, but what she said was not
what she at first had intended to say.

"Mrs. Cardew and I were discussing the lines about doubt and music, and
we cannot see what Milton means. We cannot see how music can make us
sure of a thing if there is not good reason for it."

Catharine used the first person plural with the best inte