‘Does that mean, Miss Hasty,’ said her sister, ‘that you have made up your mind Catherine will never marry?’ ‘Marry!’ cried Rose. ‘You might as ‘well talk of marrying Westminster Abbey.’ Agnes looked at her attentively. Rose’s fun had a decided lack of sweetness. ‘After all,’ she said, demurely, ‘St. Elizabeth married.’ ‘Yes, but then she was a princess. Reasons of State. If Catherine were “her Royal Highness” it would be her duty to marry, which would just make all the difference. Duty! I hate the word.’ And Rose took up a fir-cone lying near and threw it at the nose of the collie, who made a jump at it, and then resumed an attitude of blinking and dignified protest against his mistress’s follies. Agnes again studied her sister. ‘What’s the matter with you, Rose?’ ‘The usual thing, my dear,’ replied Rose, curtly, ‘only more so. I had a letter this morning from Carry Ford--the daughter you know, of those nice people I stayed in Manchester with last year. Well, she wants me to go and stay the winter with them and study under a first-rate man, Franzen, who is to be in Manchester two days a week during the winter. I haven’t said a word about it--what’s the use? I know all Catherine’s arguments by heart. Manchester is not Whindale, and papa wished us to live in Whindale; I am not somebody else and needn’t earn my bread; and art is not religion; and--’ ‘Wheels!’ exclaimed Agnes. ‘Catherine, I suppose, home from Whinborough.’ Rose got up and peered through the rhododendron bushes at the top of the wall which shut them off from the road. ‘Catherine and an unknown. Catherine driving at a foot’s pace, and the unknown walking beside her. Oh, I see, of course--Mr. Elsmere. He will come in to tea, so I’ll go for a cup. It is his duty to call on us to-day.’ When Rose came back in the wake of her mother, Catherine and Robert Elsmere were coming up the drive. Something had given Catherine more color than usual, and as Mrs. Leyburn shook hands with the young clergyman her mother’s eyes turned approvingly to her eldest daughter. ‘After all she is as handsome as Rose,’ she said to herself-’though it _is_ quite a different style.’