hat tiresome woman, Lady Charlotte Wynnstay,' she whispered
to him behind the music-stand. I never saw such a person in my life.'

'Macaulay's Lady, Holland without the brains,' suggested Langham with
languid vindictiveness as he gave her the note.

Meanwhile Mr. Wynnstay and the Squire sauntered in together.

'A village Norman-Neruda?' whispered the guest to the host. The Squire
shrugged his shoulders.

'Hush!' said Lady Charlotte, looking severely at her husband. Mr.
Wynnstay's smile instantly disappeared; he leant against the doorway
and stared sulkily at the ceiling. Then the musicians began, on some
Hungarian melodies put together by a younger rival of Brahms. They had
not played twenty bars before the attention of everyone in the room was
more or less seized--unless we except Mr. Bickerton, whose children,
good soul, were all down with some infantile ailment or other, and who
was employed in furtively watching the clock all the time to see when
it would be decent to order round the pony-carriage which would take him
back to his pale overweighted spouse.

First came wild snatches of march music, primitive, savage,
non-European; then a waltz of the lightest, maddest rhythm, broken
here and there by strange barbaric clashes; then a song, plaintive
and clinging, rich in the subtlest shades and melancholies of modern
feeling.

'Ah, but _excellent!_' said Lady Charlotte once, under her breath, at a
pause; 'and what _entrain_--what beauty!'

For Rose's figure was standing thrown out against the dusky blue of
the tapestried walls, and from that delicate relief every curve, every
grace, each tint--hair and cheek and gleaming arm gained an enchanting
picturelike distinctness. There was jessamine at her waist and among
the gold of her hair; the crystals on her neck, and on the little shoe
thrown forward beyond her dress, caught the lamplight.

'How can that man play with her and not fall in love with her?' thought
Lady Charlotte to herself, with a sigh perhaps for her own youth. 'He
looks cool enough, however; the typical don with his nose in the Air!'

Then the slow, passionate sweetness of the music swept her away with it,
she being in her way a connoisseur, and she ceased to speculate. When
the sounds ceased there was silence for a moment. Mrs. Darcy, who had
a piano in her sitting-room whereon she strummed every morning with her
tiny rheumatic fingers, and who had, as we know, strange little veins of
sentiment