There a group of unfinished, headlong sketches of the most fiercely-impressionist description--the work and the gift of a knot of Manchester artists, who had feted and flattered the beautiful little Westmoreland girl, when she was staying among them, to her heart's content.

Manchester, almost alone among our great towns of the present day, has not only a musical, but a pictorial life of its own; its young artists dub themselves 'a school,' study in Paris, and when they come home scout the Academy and its methods, and pine to set up a rival art-centre, skilled in all the methods of the Salon, in the murky north.

Rose's uncle, originally a clerk in a warehouse, and a rough diamond enough, had more or less moved with the times, like his brother Richard; at any rate he had grown rich, had married a decent wife, and was glad enough to befriend his dear brother's children, who wanted nothing of him, and did their uncle a credit of which he was sensible, by their good manners and good looks.

Music was the only point at which he touched the culture of the times, like so many business men; but it pleased him also to pose as a patron of local art; so that when Rose went to stay with her childless uncle and aunt, she found long-haired artists and fiery musicians about the place, who excited and encouraged her musical gift, who sketched her while she played, and talked to the pretty, clever, unformed creature of London and Paris, and Italy, and set her pining for that golden _vie de Boheme_ which she alone apparently of all artists was destined never to know.
For she was an artist--she would be an artist--let Catherine say what she would! She came back from Manchester restless for she knew not what, thirsty for the joys and emotions of art, determined to be free, reckless, passionate; with Wagner and Brahms in her young blood; and found Burwood waiting for her, Burwood, the lonely house in the lonely valley, of which Catherine was the presiding genius.

_Catherine!_ For Rose, what a multitude of associations clustered round the name! To her it meant everything at this moment against which her soul rebelled--the most scrupulous order, the most rigid self-repression, the most determined sacrificing of 'this warm kind world,' with all its indefensible delights, to a cold other-world, with its torturing, inadmissible claims.