rse, the whole attraction of the
position.

So that next morning Hugh Flaxman saw the comedy was to be scrupulously
kept up. It required a tolerably strong masculine certainty at the
bottom of him to enable him to resign himself once more to his part. But
he achieved it, and being himself a modern of the moderns, a lover of
half-shades and refinements of all sorts, he began very soon to enjoy
it, and to play it with an increasing cleverness and perfection.

How Rose got through Agnes' cross-questioning on the matter, history
sayeth not. Of one thing, however, a conscientious historian may be
sure, namely, that Agnes succeeded in knowing as much as she wanted
to know. Mrs. Leyburn was a little puzzled by the erratic lines of Mr.
Flaxman's journeys. It was, as she said, curious that a man should start
on a tour through the Lakes from Long Whindale.

But she took everything naively as it came, and as she was told. Nothing
with her ever passed through any changing crucible of thought. It
required no planning to elude her. Her mind was like a stretch of wet
sand, on which all impressions are equally easy to make and equally
fugitive. He liked them all, she supposed, in spite of the comparative
scantiness of his later visit to Lerwick Gardens, or he would not have
gone out of his way to see them. But as nobody suggested anything else
to her, her mind worked no further, and she was as easily beguiled after
his appearance as before it by the intricacies of some new knitting.

Things of course might have been different if Mrs. Thornburgh had
interfered again; but, as we know, poor Catherine's sorrows had raised
a whole odd host of misgivings in the mind of the Vicar's wife. She
prowled nervously around Mrs. Leyburn, filled with contempt for her
placidity; but she did not attack her. She spent herself, indeed, on
Rose and Agnes, but long practice had made them adepts in the art of
baffling her; and when Mr. Flaxman went to tea at the Vicarage in their
company, in spite of an absorbing desire to get at the truth, which
caused her to forget a new cap, and let fall a plate of tea-cakes,
she was obliged to confess crossly to the Vicar afterward that 'no one
could, tell what a man like that was after. She supposed his manners
were very aristocratic, but for her part she liked plain people.'

On the last morning of Mr. Flaxman's stay in the valley he entered the
Burwood drive about eleven o'clock, and Rose came down the steps to me