‘At any rate, Mr. Langham,’ she said, drawing herself up, and speaking with the most lofty accent, ‘if you don’t know anything personally about Madame Desforêts, I think it would be much fairer to say nothing--and not to assume at once that all you hear is true!’ Langham had rarely felt more awkward than he did then, as he sat leaning forward under the tree, this slim, indignant creature standing over him, and his consciousness about equally divided between a sense of her absurdity and a sense of her prettiness. ‘You are an advocate worth having, Miss Leyburn,’ he said at last, an enigmatical smile he could not restrain playing about his mouth. ‘I could not argue with you; I had better not try.’ Rose looked at him, at his dark regular face, at the black eyes which were much vivider than usual, perhaps because they could not help reflecting some of the irrepressible memories of Madame Desforêts and her _causes célèbres_ which were coursing through the brain behind them, and with a momentary impression of rawness, defeat, and yet involuntary attraction, which galled her intolerably, she turned away and left him. In the afternoon Robert was still unavailable to his own great chagrin, and Langham summoned up all his resignation and walked with the ladies. The general impression left upon his mind by the performance was, first that the dust of an English August is intolerable, and, secondly, that women’s society ought only to be ventured on by the men who are made for it. The views of Catherine and Rose may be deduced from his with tolerable certainty. But in the late afternoon, when they thought they had done their duty by him, and he was again alone in the garden reading, he suddenly heard the sound of music. Who was playing, and in that way? He got up and strolled past the drawing-room window to find out. Rose had got hold of an accompanist, the timid, dowdy daughter of a local solicitor, with some capacity for reading, and was now, in her lavish, impetuous fashion, rushing through a quantity of new music, the accumulations of her visit to London. She stood up beside the piano, her hair gleaming in the shadow of the drawing-room, her white brow hanging forward over her violin as she peered her way through the music, her whole soul absorbed in what she was doing, Langham passed unnoticed.