Miss Barks seated herself deliberately, after much fiddling with bracelets and gloves, and tied back the ends of her cap behind her. Mr. Mayhew took out his flute and lovingly put it together. He was a powerful swarthy man who said little, and was generally alarming to the ladies of the neighborhood. To propitiate him they asked him to bring his flute, and nervously praised the fierce music he made on it. Miss Barks enjoyed a monopoly of his accompaniments, and there were many who regarded her assiduity as a covert attack upon the widower’s name and position. If so, it was Greek meeting Greek, for with all his taciturnity the vicar of Shanmoor was well able to defend himself. ‘Has it begun?’ said a hurried whisper at Elsmere’s elbow, and turning, he saw Rose and Agnes on the step of the window, Rose’s cheeks flushed by the night breeze, a shawl thrown lightly round her head. She was answered by the first notes of the flute, following some powerful chords in which Miss Barks had tested at once the strength of her wrists and the vicarage piano. The girl made a little _moue_ of disgust, and turned as though to fly down the steps again. But Agnes caught her and held her, and the mutinous creature had to submit to be drawn inside while Mrs. Thornburgh, in obedience to complaints of draughts from Mrs. Seaton, motioned to have the window shut. Rose established herself against the wall, her curly head thrown back, her eyes half shut, her mouth expressing an angry endurance. Robert watched her with amusement. It was certainly a remarkable duet. After an _adagio_ opening in which flute and piano were at magnificent cross purposes from the beginning, the two instruments plunged into an _allegro_ very long and very fast, which became ultimately a desperate race between the competing performers for the final chord. Mr. Mayhew toiled away, taxing the resources of his whole vast frame to keep his small instrument in a line with the piano, and taxing them in vain. For the shriller and the wilder grew the flute, and the greater the exertion of the dark Hercules performing on it, the fiercer grew the pace of the piano. Rose stamped her little foot. ‘Two bars ahead last page,’ she murmured, ‘three bars this; will no one stop her!’ But the pages flew past, turned assiduously by Agnes, who took a sardonic delight in these performances, and every countenance in the room seemed to take a look of sharpened anxiety as to how the duet was to end, and who was to be victor. Nobody knowing Miss Barks need to have, been in any doubt as to that! Crash came the last chord, and the poor flute, nearly half a page behind, was left shrilly hanging, in mid-air, forsaken and companionless, an object of derision to gods and men. ‘Ah! I took it a little fast!’ said the lady, triumphantly looking up at the discomfited clergyman.