, dryly. '_He_ won't be much good to you.'

He sat on meditating while she went for pen and paper. He had forgotten
the Squire of Murewell. But Roger Wendover, the famous and eccentric
owner of Murewell Hall, hermit and scholar, possessed of one of the most
magnificent libraries in England, and author of books which had carried
a revolutionary shock into the heart of English society, was not a
figure to be overlooked by any rector of Murewell, least of all by one
possessed of Robert's culture and imagination.

The young man ransacked his memory on the subject with a sudden access
of interest in his new home that was to be.

Six weeks later they were in England, and Robert, now convalescent,
had accepted an invitation to spend a month in Long Whindale with his
mother's cousins, the Thornburghs, who offered him quiet, and bracing
air. He was to enter on his duties at Murewell in July, the Bishop, who
had been made aware of his Oxford reputation, welcoming the new recruit
to the diocese with marked warmth of manner.

CHAPTER VI.

'Agnes, if you want any tea, here it is,' cried Rose, calling from
outside through the dining-room window; 'and tell mamma.'

It was the first of June, and the spell of warmth in which Robert
Elsmere had arrived was still maintaining itself. An intelligent
foreigner dropped into the flower-sprinkled valley might have believed
that, after all, England, and even Northern England, had a summer. Early
in the season as it was, the sun was already drawing the color out of
the hills; the young green, hardly a week or two old, was darkening.
Except the oaks. They were brilliance itself against the luminous
gray-blue sky. So were the beeches, their young downy leaves just
unpacked, tumbling loosely open to the light. But the larches, and the
birches, and the hawthorns were already sobered by a longer acquaintance
with life and Phoebus.

Rose sat fanning herself with a portentous hat, which when in its proper
place served her, apparently, both as hat and as parasol. She seemed to
have been running races with a fine collie, who lay at her feet panting,
but studying her with his bright eyes, and evidently ready to be off
again at the first indication that his playmate had recovered her wind.
Chattie was coming lazily over the lawn, stretching each leg behind her
as she walked, tail arched, green eyes flaming in the sun, a model of
treacherous beauty.

'Chattie, you fiend, come here!' cried Rose,