all the vital
forces than the first, and as Elsmere, with a deep sigh, half-angry,
half-relenting, put down the letter, he felt the conviction that no
fresh influence from the outside world would ever again be allowed to
penetrate the solitude of Langham's life. In comparison with the man who
had just addressed him, the tutor of his undergraduate recollections was
a vigorous and sociable human being.

The relenting grew upon him, and he wrote a sensible, affectionate
letter in return. Whatever had been his natural feelings of resentment,
he said, he could not realize, now that the crisis was past, that he
cared less about his old friend. 'As far as we two are concerned, lot
us forget it all. I could hardly say this, you will easily imagine, if I
thought you had done serious or irreparable harm. But both my wife and
I agree now in thinking that by a pure accident, as it were, and to her
own surprise, Rose has escaped either. It will be some time, no doubt,
before she will admit it. A girl is not so easily disloyal to her past.
But to us it is tolerably clear. At any rate, I send you our opinion for
what it is worth, believing that it will and must be welcome to you.'

Rose, however was not so long in admitting it. One marked result of that
now vulnerableness of soul produced in her by the shock of that February
morning was a great softening toward Catherine. Whatever might have
been Catherine's intense relief when Robert returned from his abortive
mission, she never afterward let a disparaging word toward Langham
escape her lips to Rose. She was tenderness and sympathy itself, and
Rose, in her curious reaction against her old self, and against the
noisy world of flattery and excitement in which she had been living,
turned to Catherine as she had never done since she was a tiny child.
She would spend hours in a corner of the Bedford Square drawing-room
pretending to read, or play with little Mary, in reality recovering,
like some bruised and trodden plant, under the healing influence of
thought and silence.

One day when they were alone in the firelight, she startled Catherine by
saying with one of her old, odd smiles,--

'Do you know, Cathie, how I always see myself nowadays? It is a sort of
hullucination. I see a girl at the foot of a precipice. She has had a
fall, and she is sitting up, feeling all her limbs. And, to her great
astonishment, there is no bone broken!'

And she held herself back from Catherine's kne