readings, and the tragedy of Catherine Elsmere's life took shape in the uneasy consciousness of the vicar's spouse as a more or less sharp admonition against wilfulness in match-making.

Of course Rose had her way as to wintering in London. They came up in the middle of October while the Elsmeres were still abroad, and settled into a small house in Lerwick Gardens, Campden Hill, which Catherine had secured for them on her way through town to the Continent.

As soon as Mrs. Leyburn had been made comfortable, Rose set to work to look up her friends. She owed her acquaintance in London hitherto mainly to Mr. and Mrs. Pierson, the young barrister and his æsthetic wife whom she had originally met and made friends with in a railway-carriage. Mr. Pierson was bustling and shrewd; not made of the finest clay, yet not at all a bad fellow. His wife, the daughter of a famous Mrs. Leo Hunter of a bygone generation, was small, untidy, and in all matters of religious or political opinion 'emancipated' to an extreme. She had also a strong vein of inherited social ambition, and she and her husband welcomed Rose with greater effusion than ever, in proportion as she was more beautiful and more indisputably gifted than ever. They placed themselves and their house at the girl's service, partly out of genuine admiration and good-nature, partly also because they divined in her a profitable social appendage.

For the Piersons, socially, were still climbing, and had by no means attained. Their world, so far, consisted too much of the odds and ends of most other worlds. They were not satisfied with it, and the friendship of the girl-violinist, whose vivacious beauty and artistic gift made a stir wherever she went, was a very welcome addition to their resources. They fêted her in their own house; they took her to the houses of other people; society smiled on Miss Leyburn's protectors more than it had ever smiled on Mr. and Mrs. Pierson taken alone; and meanwhile Rose, flushed, excited, and totally unsuspicious, thought the world a fairy tale, and lived from morning till night in a perpetual din of music, compliments, and bravos, which seemed to her life indeed—life at last!

With the beginning of November the Elsmeres returned, and about the same time Rose began to project tea-parties of her own, to which Mrs. Leyburn gave a flurried assent. When the invitations were written, Rose sat staring at them a little, pen in hand.