It need hardly be said, however, that Catherine got small consolation out of this point of view. It seemed to her Robert did not take the matter quite rightly. ‘After all, darling,’ he said at last, kissing her, ‘you can act dragon splendidly; you have already--so can I. And you really cannot make me believe in anything very tragic in a week.’ But Catherine was conscious that she had already played the dragon hard, to very little purpose. In the forty hours that intervened between the scene in the garden and the Squire’s dinner party, Robert was always wanting to carry off Langham, Catherine was always asking Rose’s help in some household business or other. In vain. Langham said to himself calmly, this time, that Elsmere and his wife were making a foolish mistake in supposing that his friendship with Miss Leyburn was anything to be alarmed about, that they would soon be amply convinced of it themselves, and meanwhile he should take his own way. And as for Rose, they had no sooner turned back all three from the house to the garden, than she had divined everything in Catherine’s mind, and set herself against her sister with a wilful force in which many a past irritation found expression. How Catherine hated the music of that week! It seemed to her she never opened the drawing-room door but she saw Langham at the piano, his head with its crown of glossy, curling black hair, and his eyes lit with unwonted gleams of laughter and sympathy, turned toward Rose, who was either chatting wildly to him, mimicking the airs of some professional, or taking off the ways of some famous teacher; or else, which was worse, playing with all her soul, flooding the house with sound--now as soft and delicate as first love, now as full and grand as storm waves on an angry coast. And the sister going with compressed lip to her work-table would recognize sorely that never had the girl looked so handsome, and never had the lightnings of a wayward genius played so finely about her.