his death without any one of the kickings due to him!'

Then his very next impulse, perhaps, would be an impulse of gratitude towards this same 'creature,' towards the man who had released a prize he had had the tardy sense to see was not meant for him. Free again—to be loved, to be won! There was the fact of facts after all.

His own future policy, however, gave him much anxious thought. Clearly at present the one thing to be done was to[Pg 466] keep his own ambitions carefully out of sight. He had the skill to see that she was in a state of reaction, of moral and mental fatigue. What she mutely seemed to ask of her friends was not to be made to feel.

He took his cue accordingly. He talked to his sister. He kept Lady Charlotte in order. After all her eager expectation on Hugh's behalf, Lady Helen had been dumfoundered by the sudden emergence of Langham at Lady Charlotte's party for their common discomfiture. Who was the man?—why, what did it all mean? Hugh had the most provoking way of giving you half his confidence. To tell you he was seriously in love, and to omit to add the trifling item that the girl in question was probably on the point of engaging herself to somebody else! Lady Helen made believe to be angry, and it was not till she had reduced Hugh to a whimsical penitence and a full confession of all he knew or suspected, that she consented, with as much loftiness as the physique of an elf allowed her, to be his good friend again, and to play those cards for him which at the moment he could not play for himself.

So in the cheeriest daintiest way Rose was made much of by both brother and sister. Lady Helen chatted of gowns and music and people, whisked Rose and Agnes off to this party and that, brought fruit and flowers to Mrs. Leyburn, made pretty deferential love to Catherine, and generally, to Mrs. Pierson's disgust, became the girls' chief chaperon in a fast-filling London. Meanwhile, Mr. Flaxman was always there to befriend or amuse his sister's protégés—always there, but never in the way. He was bantering, sympathetic, critical, laudatory, what you will; but all the time he preserved a delicate distance between himself and Rose, a bright nonchalance and impersonality of tone towards her which made his companionship a perpetual tonic. And, between them, he and Helen coerced Lady Charlotte. A few inconvenient inquiries after Rose's