reversing the usual proceeding, and
asking Catherine her intentions, which would ruin everything.'

Then raising her head she swept her eyes round the sky. The wind was
freshening, the clouds were coming up fast from the westward; over the
summit of High Fell and the crags on either side, a gray straight-edged
curtain was already lowering.

'It will hold up yet a while,' she thought, 'and if it rains later we
can get a carriage at Shanmoor and come back by the road.'

And she walked on homeward meditating, her thin fingers clasped before
her, the wind blowing her skirts, the blue ribbons on her hat, the
little gold curls on her temples, in an artistic many-colored turmoil
about her. When she got to Burwood she shut herself into the room which
was peculiarly hers, the room which had been a stable. Now it was full
of artistic odds and ends--her fiddle, of course, and piles of music,
her violin stand, a few deal tables and cane chairs beautified by
a number of _chiffons_, bits of Liberty stuffs with the edges still
ragged, or cheap morsels of Syrian embroidery. On the tables stood
photographs of musicians and friends--the spoils of her visits to
Manchester, and of two visits to London which gleamed like golden points
in the girl's memory. The plastered walls were covered with an odd
medley. Here was a round mirror, of which Rose was enormously proud. She
had extracted it from a farmhouse of the neighborhood, and paid for it
with her own money. There a group of unfinished, headlong sketches of
the most fiercely-impressionist description--the work and the gift of
a knot of Manchester artists, who had feted and flattered the beautiful
little Westmoreland girl, when she was staying among them, to her
heart's content. Manchester, almost alone among our great towns of the
present day, has not only a musical, but a pictorial life of its own;
its young artists dub themselves 'a school,' study in Paris, and when
they come home scout the Academy and its methods, and pine to set up a
rival art-centre, skilled in all the methods of the Salon, in the murky
north. Rose's uncle, originally a clerk in a warehouse, and a rough
diamond enough, had more or less moved with the times, like his brother
Richard; at any rate he had grown rich, had married a decent wife, and
was glad enough to befriend his dear brother's children, who wanted
nothing of him, and did their uncle a credit of which he was sensible,
by their good manners and good lo