s
grappling on very unequal terms with Mrs. Seaton. Mrs. Leyburn had
fallen to young Elsmere. Catherine Leyburn was paired off with Mr.
Baker, Agnes with Mr. Mayhew's awkward son--a tongue-tied youth,
lately an unattached student at Oxford, but now relegated, owing to
an invincible antipathy to Greek verbs, to his native air, till some
opening into the great world should be discovered for him.

Rose was on Robert Elsmere's right. Agnes had coaxed her into a white
dress as being the least startling garment she possessed, and she was
like a Stothard picture with her high waist, her blue sash ribbon,
her slender neck and brilliant head. She had already cast many curious
glances at the Thornburgh's guest. 'Not a prig, at any rate,' she
thought to herself with satisfaction, 'so Agnes is quite wrong.'

As for the young man, who was, to begin with, in that state which so
often follows on the long confinement of illness, when the light seems
brighter and scents keener and experience sharper than at other times,
he was inwardly confessing that Mrs. Thornburgh had not been romancing.
The vivid creature at his elbow with her still unsoftened angles and
movements was in the first dawn of an exceptional beauty; the plain
sister had struck him before supper in the course of twenty minutes'
conversation as above the average in point of manners and talk. As to
Miss Leyburn, he had so far only exchanged a bow with her, but he was
watching her now, as he sat opposite to her, out of his quick observant
eyes.

She, too, was in white. As she turned to speak to the youth at her side.
Elsmere caught the fine outline of the head, the unusually clear and
perfect moulding of the brow, nose, and upper lip. The hollows in the
cheeks struck him, and the way in which the breadth of the forehead
somewhat overbalanced the delicacy of the mouth and chin. The face,
though still quite young and expressing a perfect physical health, had
the look of having been polished and refined away to its foundations.
There was not an ounce of superfluous flesh on it, and not a vestige
of Rose's peach-like bloom. Her profile, as he saw it now, had the
firmness, the clear whiteness of a profile on a Greek gem.

She was actually making that silent, awkward lad talk! Robert who,
out of his four years' experience as an Oxford tutor, had an abundant
compassion for and understanding of such beings as young Mayhew, watched
her with a pleased amusement, wondering how she