g in his prosperous days neglected his family, some of whom he
might have helped to raise.'

'Well, but,' said Robert, 'all very well for Miss Leyburn, but I don't
see the father in the two younger girls.'

'Ah, there is Catherine's difficulty,' said the vicar, shrugging his
shoulders. 'Poor thing! How well I remember her after her father's
death! She came down to see me in the dinning-room about some
arrangement for the funeral. She was only sixteen, so pale and thin with
nursing. I said something about the comfort she had been to her father.
She took my hand and burst into tears. "He was so good!" she said; "I
loved him so! Oh, Mr. Thornburgh, help me to look after the others!"
And that's been her one thought since then--that, next to following the
narrow road.'

The vicar had begun to speak with emotion, as generally happened to him
whenever he was beguiled into much speech about Catherine Leyburn. There
must have been something great somewhere in the insignificant elderly
man. A meaner soul might so easily have been jealous of this girl with
her inconveniently high standards, and her influence, surpassing his
own, in his own domain.

'I should like to know the secret of the little musician's
independence,' said Robert, musing. 'There might be no tie of blood at
all between her and the elder, so far as I can see.'

'Oh, I don't know that. There's more than you think, or Catherine
wouldn't have kept her hold over her so far as she has. Generally she
gets her way, except about the music. There Rose sticks to it.'

'And why shouldn't she?'

'Ah, well, you see, my dear fellow, I am old enough, and you're not, to
remember what people in the old days used to think about art. Of course
nowadays we all say very fine things about it; but Richard Leyburn would
no more have admitted that a girl who hadn't got her own bread or her
family's to earn by it was justified in spending her time in fiddling
than he would have approved of her spending it in dancing. I have heard
him take a text out of the "Imitation," and lecture Rose when she was
quite a baby for pestering any stray person she could get hold of to
give her music lessons. "Woe to them"--yes, that was it--"that inquire
many curious things of men, and care little about the way of serving
Me." However, he wasn't consistent. Nobody is. It was actually he that
brought Rose her first violin from London in a green baize bag. Mrs.
Leyburn took me in one night to see her