little sob. 'Don't go on, Hugh! I suppose
it's because we all of us believe so little that the poor thing's point
of view seems to one so unreal. All the same, however,' she added,
regaining her usual _role_ of magisterial common-sense, 'a woman, in my
opinion ought to go with her husband in religious matters.'

'Provided, of course, she sets him at nought in all others,' put in Mr.
Wynnstay, rising and daintily depositing the cat. 'Many men, however, my
dear, might be willing to compromise it differently. Granted a certain
_modicum_ of worldly conformity, they would not be at all indisposed to
a conscience clause.'

He lounged out of the room, while Lady Charlotte shrugged her shoulders
with a look at her nephew in which there was an irrepressible twinkle.
Mr. Flaxman neither heard nor saw. Life would have ceased to be worth
having long ago had he ever taken sides in the smallest degree in this
menage.

Flaxman walked home again, not particularly satisfied with himself and
his manoeuvres. Very likely it was quite unwise of him to have devised
another meeting between himself and Rose Leyburn so soon. Certainly she
had snubbed him--there could be no doubt of that. Nor was he in much
perplexity as to the reason. He had been forgetting himself, forgetting
his _role_ and the whole lie of the situation and if a man will be an
idiot he must suffer for it. He had distinctly been put back a move.

The facts were very simple. It was now nearly three months since
Langham's disappearance. During that time Rose Leyburn had been, to
Flaxman's mind, enchantingly dependent on him. He had played his part
so well, and the beautiful high-spirited child had suited herself so
naively to his acting! Evidently she had said to herself that his age,
his former marriage, his relation to Lady Helen, his constant kindness
to her and her sister, made it natural that she should trust him, make
him her friend, and allow him an intimacy she allowed to no other male
friend. And when once the situation had been so defined in her mind,
how the girl's true self had come out!--what delightful moments that
intimacy had contained for him!

He remembered how on one occasion he had been reading some Browning to
her and Helen, in Helen's crowded, belittered drawing-room, which seemed
all piano and photographs and lilies of the valley. He never could
exactly trace the connection between the passage he had been reading and
what happened. Probably it was mer