d and cheek lit up against
the trees and the soft August dark.

When the time came to go to bed he got their candles for the two ladies.
Rose just touched his hand with cool fingers.

'Good night, Mr. Langham. You are going in to smoke with Robert, I
suppose?'

Her bright eyes seemed to look him through. Their mocking hostility
seemed to say to him, as plainly as possible: 'Your purgatory is
over--go, smoke and be happy!'

'I will go and help him wind up his sermon,' he said, with an attempt at
a laugh, and moved away.

Rose went upstairs, and it seemed to her that a Greek brow, and a pair
of wavering, melancholy eyes went before her in the darkness chased
along the passages by the light she held. She gained her room, and stood
by the window, seized again by that stifling sense of catastrophe, so
strange, so undefined. Then she shook it off with an angry laugh, and
went to work to see how far her stock of light dresses had suffered by
her London dissipations.

CHAPTER XVI.

The next morning after breakfast the Rectory party were in the garden;
the gentlemen smoking, Catherine and her sister scrolling arm in arm
among the flowers. Catherine's vague terrors of the morning before
had all taken to themselves wings. It seemed to her that Rose and Mr.
Langham had hardly spoken to each other since she had seen them walking
about together. Robert had already made merry over his own alarms, and
hers, and she admitted he was in the right. As to her talk with Rose,
her deep meditative nature was slowly working upon and digesting it.
Meanwhile, she was all tenderness to her sister, and there was even a
reaction of pity in her heart toward the lonely sceptic who had once
been so good to Robert.

Robert was just bethinking himself that it was time to go off to the
school, when they were all startled by an unexpected visitor--a short
old lady, in a rusty black dress and bonnet, who entered the drive and
stood staring at the Rectory party, a tiny hand in a black thread glove
shading the sun from a pair of wrinkled eyes.

'Mrs. Darcy!' exclaimed Robert to his Wife after a moment's perplexity,
and they walked quickly to meet her.

Rose and Langham exchanged a few commonplaces till the others joined
them, and then for a while the attention of everybody in the group was
held by the Squire's sister. She was very small, as thin and light as
thistledown, ill-dressed, and as communicative as a babbling child. The
face and all