effort that he had made up his mind to accept the invitation
which Catherine had made an effort to write.

And, after all, the experience promised to be pleasant. His fastidious
love for the quieter, subtler sorts of beauty was touched by the Elsmere
surroundings. And whatever Miss Leyburn might be, she was not
commonplace. The demon of convention had no large part in _her_! Langham
lay awake for a time analysing his impressions of her with some gusto,
and meditating, with a whimsical candour which seldom tailed him, on the
manner in which she had trampled on him, and the reasons why.

He woke up, however, in a totally different frame of mind. He was
pre-eminently a person of moods, dependent, probably, as all moods are,
on certain obscure physical variations. And his mental temperature had
run down in the night. The house, the people who had been fresh and
interesting to him twelve hours before, were now the burden he had more
than half expected them to be. He lay and thought of the unbroken
solitude of his college rooms, of Senancour's flight from human kind, of
the uselessness of all friendship, the absurdity of all effort, and
could hardly persuade himself to get up and face a futile world, which
had, moreover, the enormous disadvantage for the moment of being a new
one.

Convention, however, is master even of an Obermann. That prototype of
all the disillusioned had to cut himself adrift from the society of the
eagles on the Dent du Midi, to go and hang like any other ridiculous
mortal on the Paris law-courts. Langham, whether he liked it or no, had
to face the parsonic breakfast and the parsonic day.

He had just finished dressing when the sound of a girl's voice drew him
to the window, which was open. In the garden stood Rose, on the edge of
the sunk fence dividing the rectory domain from the cornfield. She was
stooping forward playing with Robert's Dandie Dinmont. In one hand she
held a mass of poppies, which showed a vivid scarlet against her blue
dress; the other was stretched out seductively to the dog leaping round
her. A crystal buckle flashed at her waist; the sunshine caught the
curls of auburn hair, the pink cheek, the white moving hand, the lace
ruffles at her throat and wrist. The lithe glittering figure stood
thrown out against the heavy woods behind, the gold of the cornfield,
the blues of the distance. All the gaiety and colour which is as truly
representative of autumn as the gray languor of a Se