'You want to give yourself up to study then, and live with musicians?' he said quietly.
She shrugged her shoulders by way of answer, and began nervously to play with her rings.
That under-self which was the work and the heritage of her father in her, and which, beneath all the wilfulnesses and defiances of the other self, held its own moral debates in its own way, well out of Catherine's sight generally, began to emerge, wooed into the light by his friendly gentleness.
'But it is all so difficult, you see,' she said despairingly. 'Papa thought it wicked to care about anything except religion. If he had lived, of course I should never have been allowed to study music. It has been all mutiny so far, every bit of it, whatever I have been able to do.'
'He would have changed with the times,' said Langham.
'I know he would,' cried Rose. 'I have told Catherine so a hundred times. People—good people—think quite differently about art now, don't they, Mr. Langham?'
She spoke with perfect naïveté. He saw more and more of the child in her, in spite of that one striking development of her art.
'They call it the handmaid of religion,' he answered, smiling.
Rose made a little face.
'I shouldn't,' she said, with frank brevity. 'But then there's something else. You know where we live—at the very ends of the earth, seven miles from a station, in the very loneliest valley of all Westmoreland. What's to be done with a fiddle in such a place? Of course, ever since papa died I've just been plotting and planning to get away. But there's the difficulty,' and she crossed one white finger over another as she laid out her case. 'That house where we live has been lived in by Leyburns ever since—the Flood! Horrid set they were, I know, because I can't ever make mamma or even Catherine talk about them. But still, when papa retired, he came back and bought the old place from his brother. Such a dreadful, dreadful mistake!' cried the child, letting her hands fall over her knee.