s in his pockets.

'Will you have a confidence?' the bright eyes seemed to say. 'I am quite
ready. Claim it if you like.'

But Elsmere had no intention of offering it. The position of all Rose's
kindred, indeed, at the present moment was not easy. None of them had
the least knowledge of Rose's mind. Had she forgotten Langham? Had, she
lost her heart afresh to Flaxman? No one knew. Flaxman's absorption in
her was clear enough. But his love-making, if it was such, was not of
an ordinary kind, and did not always explain itself. And, moreover, his
wealth and social position were elements in the situation calculated
to make people like the Elsmeres particularly diffident and discreet.
Impossible for them, much as they liked him, to make any of the
advances!

No, Robert wanted no confidences. He was not prepared to take the
responsibility of them. So, letting Rose alone, he took up his visitor's
invitation to themselves, and explained the engagement for Easter Eve,
which tied them to London.

'Whew!' said Hugh Flaxman, 'but that will be a shindy worth seeing, I
must come!'

'Nonsense!' said Robert, smiling. 'Go down to Greenlaws, and go to
church. That will be much more in your line.'

'As for church,' said Flaxman meditatively. 'If I put off may party
altogether, and stay in town, there will be this further advantage,
that, after hearing you on Saturday night, I can, with a blameless
impartiality, spend the following day in St. Andrew's, Wells Street.
Yes! I telegraph to Helen--she knows my ways--and I come down to protect
you against an atheistical mob to-morrow night!'

Robert tried to dissuade him. He did not want Flaxman. Flaxman's
Epicureanism, the easy tolerance with which, now that the effervescence
of his youth had subsided, the man harbored and dallied with a dozen
contradictory beliefs, were at times peculiarly antipathetic to Elsmere.
They were so now, just as heart and soul were nerved to an effort which
could not be made at all without the nobler sort of self-confidence.

But Flaxman was determined.

'No,' he said: 'this one day we'll give to heresy. Don't look so
forbidding! In the first place, you won't see me; in the next, if
you did, you would feel me as wax in your hands. I am like the man in
Sophocles--always the possession of the last speaker! One day I am all
for the Church. A certain number of chances in the hundred there still
are, you will admit, that she is the right of it. And if so, why