?'

'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. Something had given Catherine more
color than usual, and as Mrs. Leyburn shook hands with the young
clergyman her mother's eyes turned approvingly to her eldest daughter.
'After all she is as handsome as Rose,' she said to herself-'though it
_is_ quite a different style.'

Rose, who was always tea-maker, dispensed her wares; Catherine took
her favorite low seat beside her mother, clasping Mrs. Leyburn's thin
mittened hand a while tenderly in her own; Robert and Agnes set up a
lively gossip on the subject of the Thornburghs' guests, in which Rose
joined, while Catherine looked smiling on. She seemed apart from the
rest, Robert thought; not, clearly, by her own