d just proposed.'

'What, in five days?' said Robert, more than half inclined to banter
his wife. Then he fell into meditation as Catherine made no answer. 'I
believe with men of that sort,' he said at last, 'relations to women
are never more than half-real--always more or less literature--acting.
Langham is tasting experience, to be bottled up for future use.'

It need hardly be said, however, that Catherine got small consolation
out of this point of view. It seemed to her Robert did not take the
matter quite rightly.

'After all, darling,' he said at last, kissing her, 'you can act dragon
splendidly; you have already--so can I. And you really cannot make me
believe in anything very tragic in a week.'

But Catherine was conscious that she had already played the dragon hard,
to very little purpose. In the forty hours that intervened between the
scene in the garden and the Squire's dinner party, Robert was always
wanting to carry off Langham, Catherine was always asking Rose's help
in some household business or other. In vain. Langham said to himself
calmly, this time, that Elsmere and his wife were making a foolish
mistake in supposing that his friendship with Miss Leyburn was anything
to be alarmed about, that they would soon be amply convinced of it
themselves, and meanwhile he should take his own way. And as for Rose,
they had no sooner turned back all three from the house to the garden,
than she had divined everything in Catherine's mind, and set herself
against her sister with a wilful force in which many a past irritation
found expression.

How Catherine hated the music of that week! It seemed to her she never
opened the drawing-room door but she saw Langham at the piano, his head
with its crown of glossy, curling black hair, and his eyes lit with
unwonted gleams of laughter and sympathy, turned toward Rose, who was
either chatting wildly to him, mimicking the airs of some professional,
or taking off the ways of some famous teacher; or else, which was worse,
playing with all her soul, flooding the house with sound--now as soft
and delicate as first love, now as full and grand as storm waves on an
angry coast. And the sister going with compressed lip to her work-table
would recognize sorely that never had the girl looked so handsome, and
never had the lightnings of a wayward genius played so finely about her.

As to Langham, it may well be believed that after the scene in the
garden he had rated, satirized, e