r as before.

'Poor little naughty child,' he said, bending over to her. 'I think your
father must have been a man to be loved.'

She looked at him, very near to weeping, her face working with a soft
remorse.

'Oh, so he was--so he was! If he had been hard and ugly to us, why it
would have been much easier for me, but he was so good! And there was
Catherine just like him, always preaching to us what he wished. You see
what a chain it's been--what a weight! And as I must struggle--_must_,
because I was I--to get back into the world on the other side of the
mountains, and do what all the dear wicked people there were doing, why
I have been a criminal all my life! And that isn't exhilarating always.'

And she raised her arm and let it fall beside her with the quick,
over-tragic emotion of nineteen.

'I wish your father could have heard you play as I heard you play
yesterday,' he said gently.

She started.

'_Did_ you hear me--that Wagner?'

He nodded, smiling. She still looked at him, her lips slightly open.

'Do you want to know what I thought? I have heard much music, you know.'

He laughed into her eyes, as much as to say 'I am not quite the mummy
you thought me, after all!' And she colored slightly.

'I have heard every violinist of any fame in Europe play, and play
often; and it seemed to me that with time--and work--you might play as
well as any of them.'

The slight flush became a glow that spread from brow to chin. Then she
gave a long breath and turned away, her face resting on her hand.

'And I can't help thinking,' he went on, marvelling inwardly at his own
_role_ of mentor, and his strange enjoyment of it, 'that if your father
had lived till now, and had gone with the times a little, as he must
have gone, he would have learnt to take pleasure in your pleasure, and
to fit your gift somehow into his scheme of things.'

'Catherine hasn't moved with the times,' said Rose dolefully.

Langham was silent. _Gaucherie_ seized him again when it became a
question of discussing Mrs. Elsmere, his own view was so inconveniently
emphatic.

'And you think,' she went on, 'you _really_ think, without being too
ungrateful to papa, and too unkind to the old Leyburn ghosts'--and a
little laugh danced through the vibrating voice--'I might try and get
them to give up Burwood--I might struggle to have my way? I shall, of
course I shall! I never was a meek martyr, and never shall be. But one
can't help having qualms