listened, and who enjoyed in Lady Millicent’s pet schoolroom, and sometimes by the bedside of the sick, golden opportunities of _looking_, at least, unutterable things. There could scarcely be a stronger proof of _retenue_, both on the part of the rector and that of the young lady, than the actuality that Kate, who was usually so ready at discovering love-affairs, never once suspected the truth as regarded her sister. Not even the grand phenomenon, the mighty puzzle of Rhoda’s contentment at Gillingham, had sufficed to warn the rather precocious maiden that quiet, pretty Rhoda--Rhoda, who looked, as the old saying goes, “as if butter would not melt in her mouth”--was in love with, and meekly ambitious to marry the obscure young man at whom Lady Millicent, while she deigned to patronise him, decidedly turned up her aristocratic nose. The reason for Rhoda’s silence when Kate alluded to the rector--a silence which, had Miss Kitty been in an investigating mood, that quick-witted damsel would speedily have speculated on the cause--must be now fully apparent to the reader. For a moment the shy girl thought and feared that her secret was discovered, and that, in shrinking mortification, she would be compelled to endure the wondering, kindly-meant questionings of her younger sister. The next words, however, spoken by the loquacious Kitty dissipated her alarm; and feeling intensely grateful for the reprieve, Rhoda listened with sympathising ears to the chattering girl’s remarks and surmises. “I am afraid that what Horace says is right,” continued Kate, “and that it is this odious law-business which we have heard hinted at so long that takes mamma to London. One good thing is, that she cannot mean to keep us quite as much out of fun and amusement as she does here. Haven’t you noticed how she has gradually been giving up the righteous dodge? For ages--as we all know--balls were desperately wicked, and operas a positive abomination. It was only in the country that, according to mamma, there was any chance of being saved; whereas I heard Horace say only the other day, that people could inflame themselves quite as much with idols under green trees as in the excitements of a London season. I heard him say, too--” “O Katie,” Rhoda broke out, “don’t, pray don’t, repeat the things--I mean that kind of thing--that Horace says! I cannot bear the remarks he makes about mamma; and I think that if you were not to encourage him, he would leave them off. And besides, I don’t know how it is, but I always feel guilty when I see mamma after we have been abusing her.” She spoke very seriously, for little as Lady Millicent had either deserved the filial love or encouraged the confidence of her children, it nevertheless jarred against the girl’s sense of what was right and fitting when she heard the others talk, as they were wont to do, _à cœur ouvert_, of her mother’s small hypocrisies and underground plans.