What
right has she to hold devotion so cheap? He too grows angry. 'She was
_not_ in love with that spectral creature,' the inner self declares with
energy--'I will vow she never was. But she is like all the rest--a slave
to the merest forms and trappings of sentiment. Because he _ought_ to
have loved her, and didn't, because she _fancied_ she loved him, and
didn't, my love is to be an offence to her! Monstrous--unjust!'

Suddenly they swept past St. Wilfrid's, resplendent with lights, the
jewelled windows of the choir rising above the squalid walls and roofs
into the rainy darkness, as the mystical chapel of the Graal, with
its 'torches glimmering fair,' flashed out of the mountain storm and
solitude on to Galahad's seeking eyes.

Rose bent forward involuntarily. 'What angel singing!' she said,
dropping the window again to listen to the retreating sounds, her
artist's eye Kindling. 'Did you hear it? It was the last chorus in the
St. Matthew Passion music.'

'I did not distinguish it,' he said--'but their music is famous.'

His tone was distant; there was no friendliness in it. It would have
been pleasant to her if he would have taken up her little remark and
let bygones be bygones. But he showed no readiness to do so. The subject
dropped, and presently he moved back to his former seat, and Lady
Charlotte and he resumed their talk. Rose could not but see that his
manner toward her was much changed. She herself had compelled it, but
all the same she saw him leave her with a capricious little pang of
regret, and afterward the drive seemed to her more tedious and the
dismal streets more dismal than before.

She tried to forget her companions altogether. Oh! what would Robert
have to say? She was unhappy, restless. In her trouble lately it had
often pleased her to go quite alone to strange churches, where for a
moment the burden of the self had seemed lightened. But the old things
were not always congenial to her, and there were modern ferments at work
in her. No one of her family, unless it were Agnes, suspected what was
going on. But in truth the rich crude nature had been touched at
last, as Robert's had been long ago in Mr. Grey's lecture-room, by the
piercing under-voices of things--the moral message of the world. 'What
will he have to say?' she asked herself again feverishly, and as she
looked across to Mr. Flaxman she felt a childish wish to be friends
again with him, with everybody. Life was too difficult as it