too bad that three unoffending
women should have such a role as this assigned them against their will!'

The eloquence of eighteen was irresistible. Agnes buried her head in the
sofa cushion, and shook with a kind of helpless laughter. Rose meanwhile
stood in the window, her thin form drawing up to its full height, angry
with Agnes, and enraged with all the world.

'It's absurd, it's insulting,' she exclaimed. 'I should imagine that you
and I Agnes, were old enough and sane enough to look after mamma, put
out the stores, say our prayers, and prevent each other from running
away with adventurers! I won't be always in leading-strings. I won't
acknowledge that Catherine is bound to be an old maid to keep me in
order. I hate it! It is sacrifice run mad.'

And Rose turned to her sister, the defiant head thrown back, a passion
of manifold protest in the girlish looks.

'It is very easy, my dear, to be judge in one's own case,' replied Agnes
calmly, recovering herself. 'Suppose you tell Catherine some of these
home-truths?'

Rose collapsed at once. She sat down despondently, and fell, head
drooping, into a moody silence, Agnes watched her with a kind of
triumph. When it came to the point, she knew perfectly well that there
was not a will among them that could measure itself with any chance of
success against that lofty, but unwavering will of Catherine's. Rose was
violent, and there was much reason in her violence. But as for her, she
preferred not to dash her head against stone walls.

'Well, then, if you won't say them to Catherine, say them to mamma,' she
suggested presently, but half ironically.

'Mamma is no good,' cried Rose angrily; 'why do you bring her in?
Catherine would talk her round in ten minutes.'

Long after everyone else in Burwood, even the chafing, excited Rose, was
asleep, Catherine in her dimly lighted room, where the stormy northwest
wind beat noisily against her window, was sitting in a low chair, her
head leaning against her bed, her little well-worn Testament open on her
knee. But she was not reading. Her eyes were shut; one hand hung down
beside her, and tears were raining fast and silently over her cheeks. It
was the stillest, most restrained weeping. She hardly knew why she wept,
she only knew that there was something within her which must have its
way. What did this inner smart and tumult mean, this rebellion of the
self against the will which had never yet found its mastery fail it? It
wa