'Had he been so happy there?'
'Happy!'—and Rose's lip curled. 'His brothers used to kick and cuff him, his father was awfully unkind to him, he never had a day's peace till he went to school, and after he went to school he never came back for years and years and years, till Catherine was fifteen. What could have made him so fond of it?'
And again looking despondently into the fire she pondered that far-off perversity of her father's.
'Blood has strange magnetisms,' said Langham, seized as he spoke by the pensive prettiness of the bent head and neck, 'and they show themselves in the oddest ways.'
'Then I wish they wouldn't,' she said irritably. 'But that isn't all. He went there, not only because he loved that place, but because he hated other places. I think he must have thought'—and her voice dropped—'he wasn't going to live long—he wasn't well when he gave up the school—and then we could grow up there safe, without any chance of getting into mischief. Catherine says he thought the world was getting very wicked and dangerous and irreligious, and that it comforted him to know that we should be out of it.'
Then she broke off suddenly.
'Do you know,' she went on wistfully, raising her beautiful eyes to her companion, 'after all, he gave me my first violin?'
Langham smiled.
'I like that little inconsequence,' he said.