reached its destination only wounded Catherine by its
constraint and convention.

And yet that same night when the child was alone, suddenly some phrase
of Catherine's letter recurred to her. She _saw_, as only imaginative
people see, with every detail visualised, her sister's suffering, her
sister's struggle that was to be. She jumped into bed, and, stifling all
sounds under the clothes, cried herself to sleep, which did not prevent
her next morning from harbouring somewhere at the bottom of her, a
wicked and furtive satisfaction that Catherine might now learn there
were more opinions in the world than one.

As for the rest of the valley, Mrs. Leyburn soon passed from bewailing
to a plaintive indignation with Robert, which was a relief to her
daughters. It seemed to her a reflection on 'Richard' that Robert should
have behaved so. Church opinions had been good enough for 'Richard.'
'The young men seem to think, my dears, their fathers were all fools!'

The vicar, good man, was sincerely distressed, but sincerely confident,
also, that in time Elsmere would find his way back into the fold. In
Mrs. Thornburgh's dismay there was a secret superstitious pang. Perhaps
she had better not have meddled. Perhaps it was never well to meddle.
One event bears many readings, and the tragedy of Catherine Elsmere's
life took shape in the uneasy consciousness of the vicar's spouse as a
more or less sharp admonition against wilfulness in match-making.

Of course Rose had her way as to wintering in London. They came up in
the middle of October while the Elsmeres were still abroad, and settled
into a small house in Lerwick Gardens, Campden Hill, which Catherine had
secured for them on her way through town to the Continent.

As soon as Mrs. Leyburn had been made comfortable, Rose set to work to
look up her friends. She owed her acquaintance in London hitherto mainly
to Mr. and Mrs. Pierson, the young barrister and his aesthetic wife whom
she had originally met and made friends with in a railway-carriage. Mr.
Pierson was bustling and shrewd; not made of the finest clay, yet not at
all a bad fellow. His wife, the daughter of a famous Mrs. Leo Hunter of
a bygone generation, was small, untidy, and in all matters of religious
or political opinion 'emancipated' to an extreme. She had also a strong
vein of inherited social ambition, and she and her husband welcomed Rose
with greater effusion than ever, in proportion as she was more beautiful