e lest her sister should
attempt to caress her, her eyes bright and calm. Nor would she allow
an answer, drowning all that Catherine might have said in a sudden rush
after the child, who was wandering round them in search of a playfellow.

In truth, Rose Leyburn's girlish passion for Edward Langham had been
a kind of accident unrelated to the main forces of character. He had
crossed her path in a moment of discontent, of aimless revolt and
lounging when she was but fresh emerged from the cramping conditions of
her childhood and trembling on the brink of new and unknown activities.
His intellectual prestige, his melancholy, his personal beauty, his very
strangenesses and weaknesses, had made a deep impression on the girl's
immature romantic sense. His resistance had increased the charm, and the
interval of angry, resentful separation had done nothing to weaken it.
As to the months in London, they had been one long duel between
herself and him--a duel which had all the fascination of difficulty and
uncertainty, but in which pride and caprice had dealt and sustained
a large portion of the blows. Then, after a moment of intoxicating
victory, Langham's endangered habits and threatened individuality
had asserted themselves once for all. And from the whole long
struggle--passion, exultation, and crushing defeat--it often seemed to
her that she had gained neither joy nor irreparable grief, but a new
birth of character, a soul!

It may easily be imagined that Hugh Flaxman felt a peculiarly keen
interest in Langham's disappearance. On the afternoon of the Searle
House rehearsal he had awaited Rose's coming in a state of extraordinary
irritation. He expected a blushing _fiancee_, in a fool's paradise,
asking by manner, if not by word, for his congratulations, and taking a
decent feminine pleasure perhaps in the pang she might suspect in
him. And he had already taken his pleasure in the planning of some
double-edged congratulations.

Then up the steps of the concert platform there came a pale, tired girl
who seemed specially to avoid his look, who found a quiet corner and
said hardly a word to anybody till her turn came to play.

His revulsion of feeling was complete. After her piece he made his way
up to her, and was her watchful, unobtrusive guardian for the rest of
the afternoon.

He walked home after he had put her into her cab in a whirl of impatient
conjecture.

'As compared to last night, she looks this afternoon as i