'Ah, well, you see, my dear fellow, I am old enough, and you're not, to remember what people in the old days used to think about art. Of course nowadays we all say very fine things about it; but Richard Leyburn would no more have admitted that a girl who hadn't got her own bread or her family's to earn by it was justified in spending her time in fiddling than he would have approved of her spending it in dancing. I have heard him take a text out of the "Imitation," and lecture Rose when she was quite a baby for pestering any stray person she could get hold of to give her music lessons. "Woe to them"--yes, that was it--"that inquire many curious things of men, and care little about the way of serving Me." However, he wasn't consistent. Nobody is. It was actually he that brought Rose her first violin from London in a green baize bag. Mrs. Leyburn took me in one night to see her asleep with it on her pillow, and all her pretty curls lying over the strings. I dare say poor man, it was one of the acts toward his children that tormented his mind in his last hour.'
'She has certainly had her way about practising it; she plays superbly.'
'Oh, yes, she has had her way. She is a queer mixture, is Rose. I see a touch of the old Leyburn recklessness in her; and then there is the beauty and refinement of bar mother's side of the family. Lately she has got quite out of hand. She went to stay with some relations they have in Manchester, got drawn into a musical set there, took to these funny gowns, and now she and Catherine are, always half at war. Poor Catherine said to me the other day, with tears, in her eyes, that she knew Rose thought her as hard as iron. "But I promised papa." She makes herself miserable and it's no use. I wish the little wild thing would get herself well married. She's not meant for this humdrum place and she may kick over the traces.'
'She's pretty enough for anything and anybody,' said Robert.
The vicar looked at him sharply, but the young man's critical and meditative look reassured him.
The next day, just before early dinner, Rose and Agnes, who had been for a walk, were startled, as they were turning into their own gate, by the frantic waving of a white handkerchief from the Vicarage garden. It was Mrs. Thornburgh's accepted way of calling the attention of the Burwood inmates, and the girls walked on. They found the good lady waiting for them in the drive in a characteristic glow and flutter.