Charley puffed and puffed, with much exertion. The red gleam of the pipe got reflected under his shaggy eyebrows in something liquid. Then he burst into an unsteady laugh. ‘You might as well fire a damp haystack as light a pipe that’s gone out,’ was the next sentimental remark he made. ‘Have a cigar?’ said Cosmo, tenderly, producing a case out of his pocket, with eager benevolence. And thus their peace was made. Anne’s name was not mentioned, neither was there anything said but these vague allusions to the state of affairs generally. Of all things in the world sentimental explanations are most foreign to the intercourse of young Englishmen with each other. But when Willie Ashley returned, very wet, and with an incipient cold in his head from the impatient flight he had made, he was punished for his cowardly abandonment of an unpleasant position by finding his brother with the old bonds refitted upon him, completely restored to his old devotion and subjection to Cosmo. Willie retired to bed soon after, kicking off his boots with an energy which was full of wrath. ‘The fool!’ he said to himself; while the reconciled pair carried on their tobacco and their reunion till far in the night. They were not conversational, however, though they were reconciled. Conversation was not necessary to the curate’s view of social happiness, and Cosmo was glad enough to go back upon his own thoughts. While this was going on at the Rectory, Anne for her part was submitting to a still more severe course of interrogation. Mrs. Mountford had discussed the question with herself at some length, whether she should take any notice or not of the domestic convulsion which had occurred under her very eye without having been brought openly to her cognisance. Her husband had of course told her all about it; but Anne had not said anything--had neither consulted her stepmother nor sought her sympathy. After a while, however, Mrs. Mountford sensibly decided that to ignore a matter of such importance, or to make-believe that she was not acquainted with it, would be equally absurd. Accordingly she arranged that Rose should be sent for after dinner to have a dress tried on; which was done, to that young lady’s great annoyance and wrath. Mrs. Worth, Mrs. Mountford’s maid, was not a person who could be defied with impunity. She was the goddess Fashion, La Mode impersonified at Mount. Under her orders she had a niece, who served as maid to Anne and Rose; and these two together made the dresses of the family. It was a great economy, Mrs. Mountford said, and all the county knew how completely successful it was. But to the girls it was a trouble, if an advantage. Mrs. Worth studied their figures, their complexions, and what she called their ‘hidiousiucrasies’--but she did not study the hours that were convenient for them, or make allowance for their other occupations. And she was a tyrant, if a beneficent one. So Rose had to go, however loth.