g was shaken by it, and
by that last look of hers. 'Have I gone too far?' he asked himself
anxiously. 'Is it divinely true--_already_--that she resents being left
to herself! Oh! little rebel! You tried your best not to let me see. But
you were angry, you were! Now, then, how to proceed? She is all fire,
all character; I rejoice in it. She will give me trouble; so much the
better. Poor little hurt thing! the fight is only beginning; but I will
make her do penance some day for all that loftiness to-night.'

If these reflections betray to the reader a certain masterful note of
confidence in Mr. Flaxman's mind, he will perhaps find small cause to
regret that Rose did give him a great deal of trouble.

Nothing could have been more 'salutary,' to use his own word, than the
dance she led him during the next three weeks. She provoked him indeed
at moments so much that he was a hundred times on the point of trying
to seize his kingdom of heaven by violence, of throwing himself upon her
with a tempest shock of reproach and appeal. But some secret instinct
restrained him. She was wilful, she was capricious; she had a real and
powerful distraction in her art. He must be patient and risk nothing.

He suspected, too, what was the truth--that Lady Charlotte was doing
harm. Rose, indeed, had grown so touchily sensitive that she found
offence in almost every word of Lady Charlotte's about her nephew. Why
should the apparently casual remarks of the aunt bear so constantly on
the subject of the nephew's social importance? Rose vowed to herself
that she needed no reminder of that station whereunto it had pleased
God to call her, and that Lady Charlotte might spare herself all those
anxieties and reluctances which the girl's quick sense detected, in
spite of the invitations so freely showered on Lerwick Gardens.

The end of it all was that Hugh Flaxman found himself again driven into
a corner. At the bottom of him was still a confidence that would not
yield. Was it possible that he had ever given her some tiny involuntary
glimpse of it, and that but for that glimpse she would have let him make
his peace much more easily? At any rate, now he felt himself at the end
of his resources.

'I must change the venue,' he said to himself; 'decidedly I must change
the venue.'

So by the end of June he had accepted an invitation to fish in Norway
with a friend, and was gone. Rose received the news with a callousness
which made even Lady Helen wa