She chose to be offended by the inquiry, and answered pettishly that for once she had been out by herself without a keeper. He took no notice of her tone, and walked on beside her, his eyes on the ground. Presently she wondered whether he had heard her reply at all, he was so evidently thinking of something else. In her turn she began to ask questions. "What's happening in the village? Why are those people coming out of the Cowroast?" "There's been an inquest there." "On that old woman who was once a servant of ours?" The Rector looked up quickly. "Who told you anything about her?" "Oh, Sarah heard from Tibbald--trust him for gossip! Was she off her head?" "She died of disease of the brain. They found her dead in her bed." "Well, why shouldn't she? An excellent way to die! Good night, Uncle Richard--good night! You go too slow for me." She walked away with a defiant air, intended to show him that he was in her black books. He stood a moment looking after her, compunction and sad affection in his kind eyes. CHAPTER VIII Meanwhile, for Catharine Elsmere and Mary these days of early autumn were passing in a profound external quiet which bore but small relation to the mental history of mother and daughter. The tranquillity indeed of the little water-locked cottage was complete. Mrs. Flaxman at the big house took all the social brunt upon herself. She set no limit to her own calls, or to her readiness to be called upon. The Flaxman dinner and tennis parties were soon an institution in the neighbourhood; and the distinguished persons who gathered at Maudeley for the Flaxman week-ends shed a reflected lustre on Upcote itself. But Rose Flaxman stoutly protected her widowed sister. Mrs. Elsmere was delicate and in need of rest; she was not to be expected to take part in any social junketings, and callers were quite plainly warned off. For all of which Catharine Elsmere was grateful to a younger sister, grotesquely unlike herself in temperament and character, yet brought steadily closer to her by the mere passage of life. Rose was an artist and an optimist. In her youth she had been an eager and exquisite musician; in her middle life she was a loving and a happy woman, though she too had known a tragic moment in her first youth. Catharine, her elder by some years, still maintained, beneath an exquisite refinement, the strong north-country characteristics of the Westmoreland family to which the sisters belonged. Her father had been an Evangelical scholar and headmaster; the one slip of learning in a rude and primitive race. She had been trained by him; and in spite of her seven years of married life beside a nature so plastic and sensitive as Elsmere's, and of her passionate love for her husband, it was the early influences on her character which had in the end proved the more enduring.