e night breeze, a shawl thrown lightly round her head.

She was answered by the first notes of the flute, following some
powerful chords in which Miss Barks had tested at once the strength of
her wrists and the vicarage piano.

The girl made a little _moue_ of disgust, and turned as though to fly
down the steps again. But Agnes caught her and held her, and the
mutinous creature had to submit to be drawn inside while Mrs.
Thornburgh, in obedience to complaints of draughts from Mrs. Seaton
motioned to have the window shut. Rose established herself against the
wall, her curly head thrown back, her eyes half shut, her mouth
expressing an angry endurance. Robert watched her with amusement.

It was certainly a remarkable duet. After an _adagio_ opening in which
flute and piano were at magnificent cross purposes from the beginning,
the two instruments plunged into an _allegro_ very long and very fast,
which became ultimately a desperate race between the competing
performers for the final chord. Mr. Mayhew toiled away, taxing the
resources of his whole vast frame to keep his small instrument in a line
with the piano, and taxing them in vain. For the shriller and the wilder
grew the flute, and the greater the exertion of the dark Hercules
performing on it, the fiercer grew the pace of the piano. Rose stamped
her little foot.

'Two bars ahead last page,' she murmured, 'three bars this: will no one
stop her!'

But the pages flew past, turned assiduously by Agnes, who took a
sardonic delight in these performances, and every countenance in the
room seemed to take a look of sharpened anxiety as to how the duet was
to end, and who was to be victor.

Nobody knowing Miss Barks need to have been in any doubt as to that!
Crash came the last chord, and the poor flute nearly half a page behind
was left shrilly hanging in mid-air, forsaken and companionless, an
object of derision to gods and men.

'Ah! I took it a little fast!' said the lady, triumphantly looking up at
the discomfited clergyman.

'Mr. Elsmere,' said Rose, hiding herself in the window curtain beside
him, that she might have her laugh in safety. 'Do they play like that in
Oxford, or has Long Whindale a monopoly?'

But before he could answer, Mrs. Thornburgh called to the girl--

'Rose! Rose! Don't go out again! It is your turn next!'

Rose advanced reluctantly, her head in air. Robert, remembering
something that Mrs. Thornburgh had said to him as to her musical po