large
eyes, and small colorless mouths. The father, a picturesque, handsome
fellow, looking as though he had gypsy blood in his veins, had opened
the door to their knock. Robert, seeing the meal, would have retreated
at once, in spite of the children's shy inviting looks, but a glance
past them at the mother's face checked the word of refusal and apology
on his lips, and he stepped in.

In after years Langham was always apt to see him in imagination as he
saw him then, standing beside the bent figure of the mother, his quick,
pitiful eyes taking in the pallor and exhaustion of face and frame,
his hand resting instinctively on the head of a small creature that had
crept up beside him, his look all attention and softness as the woman
feebly told him some of the main facts of her state. The young Rector
at the moment might have stood for the modern 'Man of Feeling,' as
sensitive, as impressionable, and as free from the burden of self, as
his eighteenth-century prototype.

On the way home Robert suddenly remarked to his companion, 'Have you
heard my sister-in-law play yet, Langham? What did you think of it?'

'Extraordinary!' said Langham briefly. 'The most considerable gift I
ever came across in an amateur.'

His olive cheek flushed a little involuntarily. Robert threw a quick
observant look at him.

'The difficulty,' he exclaimed, 'is to know what to do with it!'

'Why do you make the difficulty? I gather she wants to study abroad.
What is there to prevent it?'

Langham turned to his companion with a touch of asperity. He could not
stand it that Elsmere should be so much narrowed and warped by that wife
of his, and her prejudices. Why should that gifted creature be cribbed,
cabined, and confined in this way?

'I grant you,' said Robert with a look of perplexity, 'there is not much
to prevent it.'

And he was silent a moment, thinking, on his side, very tenderly of all
the antecedents and explanations of that old-world distrust of art and
the artistic life so deeply rooted in his wife, even though in practice
and under his influence she had made concession after concession.

'The great solution of all,' he said presently, brightening, would be
to get her married. I don't wonder her belongings dislike the notion of
anything so pretty and so flighty, going off to live by itself. And to
break up the home in Whindale would be to undo everything their father
did for them, to defy his most solemn last wishes.'

'T