ver another as she laid
out her case. 'That house where we live, has been lived in by Leyburns
ever since--the Flood! Horrid set they were, I know, because I can't
ever make mamma or even Catherine talk about them. But still, when papa
retired, he came back and bought the old place from his brother. Such
a dreadful, dreadful mistake!' cried the child, letting her hands fall
over her knee.

'Had he been so happy there?'

'Happy!--and Rose's lip curled. 'His brothers used to kick and cuff him,
his father was awfully unkind to him, he never had a day's peace till he
went to school, and after he went to school he never came back for years
and years and years, till Catherine was fifteen. What _could_ have made
him so fond of it?'

And again looking despondently into the fire, she pondered that far-off
perversity of her father's.

'Blood has strange magnetisms,' said, Langham, seized as he spoke by the
pensive prettiness of the bent head and neck, 'and they show themselves
in the oddest ways.'

'Then I wish they wouldn't,' she said irritably. 'But that isn't all. He
went there, not only because he loved that place, but because he hated
other places. I think he must have thought'--and her voice dropped--'he
wasn't going to live long--he wasn't well when he gave up the
school--and then we could grow up there safe, without any chance of
getting into mischief. Catherine says he thought the world was getting
very wicked, and dangerous, and irreligious, and that it comforted him
to know that we should be out of it.'

Then she broke off suddenly.

'Do you know,' she went on wistfully, raising her beautiful eyes to her
companion, 'after all, he gave me my first violin?'

Langham smiled.

'I like that little inconsequence,' he said.

'Then of course I took to it, like a cluck to water, and it began to
scare him that I loved it so much. He and Catherine only loved religion,
and us, and the poor. So he always took it away on Sundays. Then I hated
Sundays, and would never be good on them. One Sunday I cried myself
nearly into a fit on the dining-room floor, because I mightn't have it.
Then he came in, and he took me up, and he tied a Scotch plaid around
his neck, and he put me into it, and carried me away right up on to the
hills, and he talked to me like an angel. He asked me not to make him
sad before God that he had given me that violin; so I never screamed
again-on Sundays!'

Her companion's eyes were not quite as clea