just twinkling in the pale blue. Far
away under the crag on the farther side of High Fell a light was
shining. As Catherine's eyes caught it there was a quick response in the
fine Madonna-like face.

'Any news for me from the Backhouses this afternoon?' she asked Rose.

'No, I heard of none. How is she?'

'Dying,' said Catherine simply, and stood a moment looking out. Rose did
not interrupt her. She knew that the house from which the light was
shining sheltered a tragedy; she guessed with the vagueness of nineteen
that it was a tragedy of passion and sin; but Catherine had not been
communicative on the subject, and Rose had for some time past set up a
dumb resistance to her sister's most characteristic ways of life and
thought, which prevented her now from asking questions. She wished
nervously to give Catherine's extraordinary moral strength no greater
advantage over her than she could help.

Presently, however, Catherine threw her arm round her with a tender
protectingness.

'What did you do with yourself all the afternoon, Roeschen?'

'I practised for two hours,' said the girl shortly, 'and two hours this
morning. My Spohr is nearly perfect.'

'And you didn't look into the school?' asked Catherine, hesitating; 'I
know Miss Merry expected you.'

'No, I didn't. When one can play the violin and can't teach, any more
than a cockatoo, what's the good of wasting one's time in teaching?'

Catherine did not reply. A minute after Mrs. Leyburn called her, and she
went to sit on a stool at her mother's feet, her hands resting on the
elder woman's lap, the whole attitude of the tall active figure one of
beautiful and childlike abandonment. Mrs. Leyburn wanted to confide in
her about a new cap, and Catherine took up the subject with a zest which
kept her mother happy till bedtime.

'Why couldn't she take as much interest in my Spohr?' thought Rose.

Late that night, long after she had performed all a maid's offices for
her mother, Catherine Leyburn was busy in her own room arranging a large
cupboard containing medicines and ordinary medical necessaries, a
storehouse whence all the simpler emergencies of their end of the valley
were supplied. She had put on a white flannel dressing-gown and moved
noiselessly about in it, the very embodiment of order, of purity, of
quiet energy. The little white-curtained room was bareness and neatness
itself. There were a few book-shelves along the walls, holding the books
which her