per of a fiend. He will be odious, insufferable for all the world
besides, except for me; and for me he will be heaven.'

She threw herself back, a twinkle in her bright eye, but a little flush
of something half real on her cheek.

'No doubt,' said Agnes drily. 'But you can't wonder if under the
circumstances I don't pine for a brother-in-law. To return to the
subject, however, Catherine liked him. She said so.'

'Oh, that doesn't count,' replied Rose discontentedly; 'Catherine likes
everybody--of a certain sort--and everybody likes Catherine.'

'Does that mean, Miss Hasty,' said her sister, 'that you have made up
your mind Catherine will never marry?'

'Marry!' cried Rose. 'You might as well talk of marrying Westminster
Abbey.'

Agnes looked at her attentively. Rose's fun had a decided lack of
sweetness. 'After all,' she said demurely, 'St. Elizabeth married.'

'Yes, but then she was a princess. Reasons of State. If Catherine were
"her Royal Highness" it would be her duty to marry, which would just
make _all_ the difference. Duty! I hate the word.'

And Rose took up a fir-cone lying near and threw it at the nose of the
collie, who made a jump at it, and then resumed an attitude of blinking
and dignified protest against his mistress's follies.

Agnes again studied her sister. 'What's the matter with you, Rose?'

'The usual thing, my dear,' replied Rose curtly, 'only more so. I had a
letter this morning from Carry Ford--the daughter, you know, of those
nice people I stayed in Manchester with last year. Well, she wants me to
go and stay the winter with them and study under a first-rate man,
Franzen, who is to be in Manchester two days a week during the winter. I
haven't said a word about it--what's the use? I know all Catherine's
arguments by heart. Manchester is not Whindale, and papa wished us to
live in Whindale; I am not somebody else and needn't earn my bread; and
art is not religion; and----'

'Wheels!' exclaimed Agnes. 'Catherine, I suppose, home from
Whinborough.'

Rose got up and peered through the rhododendron bushes at the top of the
wall which shut them off from the road.

'Catherine, and an unknown. Catherine driving at a foot's pace, and the
unknown walking beside her. Oh, I see, of course--Mr. Elsmere. He will
come in to tea, so I'll go for a cup. It is his duty to call on us
to-day.'

When Rose came back in the wake of her mother, Catherine and Robert
Elsmere were coming up the drive. Some