"We are too old," he said again; and then he went on dreaming of that day's drive, and Helen's gentle farewell--of the walks they had had in his garden--the flowers she had taken from his hand. Lastly, of his sister's words respecting disturbing influences, and then settling down to their own happy humdrum life once again. "It is fate!" he said, at last--"fate. Can we bring back the past?" He felt that he could not, even as his sister felt just then, as she knelt beside one of the chairs in her own sweet-scented room, and asked for strength, as she termed it, to fight against this temptation. "No," she cried, at last; "I cannot--I will not! For Arthur's sake I will be firm." VOLUME ONE, CHAPTER ELEVEN. A DIFFICULTY SOLVED. A week passed, during which all had been very quiet at the Rectory, brother and sister meeting each other hour by hour in a kind of saddened calm. The Reverend Arthur was paler than usual, almost cadaverous, while there was a troubled, anxious look in little Miss Rosebury's eyes, and a sharpness in her voice that was not there on the day when Dr Bolter proposed. No news had been heard of the young ladies at Miss Twettenham's; and Dr Bolter, to Miss Rosebury's sorrow, had not written to her brother. But she bravely fought down her suffering, busying herself with more than usual zeal in home and parish; while the Reverend Arthur came back evening after evening faint, weary, and haggard, from some long botanical ramble. The eighth day had arrived, and towards noon little Miss Rosebury was quietly seated by the open window with her work, fallen upon her knee, and a sad expression in her eyes as she gazed wistfully along the road, thinking, truth to tell, that Dr Bolter might perhaps come in to their early dinner. Doctors were so seldom ill, or perhaps he might be lying suffering at some hotel. The thought sent a pang through the little body, making her start, and seizing her needle, begin to work, when a warm flush came into her cheeks as she heard at one and the same time the noise of wheels, and a slow, heavy step upon the gravel. The step she well knew, and for a few moments she did not look up; but when she did she uttered an exclamation. "Tut--tut--tut!" she said. "If anyone saw poor Arthur now they would think him mad." Certainly the long, gaunt figure of the Reverend Arthur Rosebury, in his soft, shapeless felt hat, and long, clinging, shabby black alpaca coat, was very suggestive of his being a kind of male Ophelia gone slightly distraught as the consequence of a disappointment in love.