he Idols of the
Market-place_?'

Robert nodded.

'Did you ever meet him at Oxford? I believe he was there once or twice
during my time, but I never saw him.'

'Yes,' said Langham, thinking. 'I met him at dinner at the
Vice-Chancellor's, now I remember. A bizarre and formidable person--very
difficult to talk to,' he added reflectively.

Then as he looked up he caught a sarcastic twitch of Rose Leyburn's lip
and understood it in a moment. Incontinently he forgot the squire and
fell to asking himself what had possessed him on that luckless journey
down. He had never seemed to himself more perverse, more unmanageable;
and for once his philosophy did not enable him to swallow the certainty
that this slim flashing creature must have thought him a morbid idiot
with as much _sangfroid_ as usual.

Robert interrupted his reflections by some Oxford question, and
presently Catherine carried off Rose to her room. On their way they
passed a door, beside which Catherine paused hesitating, and then with a
bright flush on the face, which had such maternal calm in it already,
she threw her arm round Rose and drew her in. It was a white empty room,
smelling of the roses outside, and waiting in the evening stillness for
the life that was to be. Rose looked at it all--at the piles of tiny
garments, the cradle, the pictures from Retsch's 'Song of the Bell,'
which had been the companion of their own childhood, on the walls--and
something stirred in the girl's breast.

'Catherine, I believe you have everything you want, or you soon will
have!' she cried, almost with a kind of bitterness, laying her hands on
her sister's shoulders.

'Everything but worthiness!' said Catherine softly, a mist rising in her
calm gray eyes. 'And you, Roeschen,' she added wistfully, 'have you been
getting a little more what you want?'

'What's the good of asking?' said the girl, with a little shrug of
impatience. 'As if creatures like me ever got what they want! London has
been good fun certainly--if one could get enough of it. Catherine, how
long is that marvellous person going to stay?' and she pointed in the
direction of Langham's room.

'A week,' said Catherine, smiling at the girl's disdainful tone. 'I was
afraid you didn't take to him.'

'I never saw such a being before,' declared Rose--'never! I thought I
should never get a plain answer from him about anything. He wasn't even
quite certain it was a fine day! I wonder if you set fire to him whethe