‘But it is all so difficult, you see,’ she said despairingly. ‘Papa thought it wicked to care about anything except religion. If he had lived, of course I should never have been allowed to study music. It has been all mutiny so far, every bit of it, whatever I have been able to do.’ ‘He would have changed with the times,’ said Langham. ‘I know he would,’ cried Rose. ‘I have told Catherine so a hundred times. People--good people--think quite differently about art now, don’t they, Mr. Langham? She spoke with perfect _naïveté_. He saw more and more of the child in her, in spite of that one striking development of her art. ‘They call it the handmaid of religion,’ he answered, smiling. Rose made a little face. ‘I shouldn’t,’ she said, with frank brevity. ‘But then there’s something else. You know where we live--at the very ends of the earth, seven miles from a station, in the very loneliest valley of all Westmoreland. What’s to be done with a fiddle in such a place? Of course, ever since papa died I’ve just been plotting and planning to get away. But there’s the difficulty,’--and she crossed one white finger over another as she laid out her case. ‘That house where we live, has been lived in by Leyburns ever since--the Flood! Horrid set they were, I know, because I can’t ever make mamma or even Catherine talk about them. But still, when papa retired, he came back and bought the old place from his brother. Such a dreadful, dreadful mistake!’ cried the child, letting her hands fall over her knee. ‘Had he been so happy there?’ ‘Happy!--and Rose’s lip curled. ‘His brothers used to kick and cuff him, his father was awfully unkind to him, he never had a day’s peace till he went to school, and after he went to school he never came back for years and years and years, till Catherine was fifteen. What _could_ have made him so fond of it?’ And again looking despondently into the fire, she pondered that far-off perversity of her father’s. ‘Blood has strange magnetisms,’ said, Langham, seized as he spoke by the pensive prettiness of the bent head and neck, ‘and they show themselves in the oddest ways.’ ‘Then I wish they wouldn’t,’ she said irritably. ‘But that isn’t all. He went there, not only because he loved that place, but because he hated other places. I think he must have thought’--and her voice dropped--‘he wasn’t going to live long--he wasn’t well when he gave up the school--and then we could grow up there safe, without any chance of getting into mischief. Catherine says he thought the world was getting very wicked, and dangerous, and irreligious, and that it comforted him to know that we should be out of it.’ Then she broke off suddenly. ‘Do you know,’ she went on wistfully, raising her beautiful eyes to her companion, ‘after all, he gave me my first violin?’ Langham smiled. ‘I like that little inconsequence,’ he said.