Here was a charming young man who had fallen in love with her at first sight, and had done his best to make the fact plain to her in the most chivalrous, devoted ways.

Catherine encourages him, walks with him, talks with him, is for a whole three weeks more gay and cheerful and more like other girls than she has ever been known to be, and then, at the end of it, just when everybody is breathlessly awaiting the natural _denouement_, goes off to spend the day that should have been the day of her betrothal in pottering about orphan asylums;--leaving everybody, but especially the poor young man, to look ridiculous! No, Mrs.Thornburgh had no patience with her--none at all.
It was all because she would not be happy like anybody else, but must needs set herself up to be peculiar.

Why not live on a pillar, and go into hair-shirts at once?
Then the rest of the world would know what to be at.
Meanwhile Rose was in no small excitement.

While her mother and Elsmere had been talking in the garden, she had been discreetly waiting in the back behind the angle of the house, and when she saw Elsmere walk off she followed him with eager, sympathetic eyes.
'Poor fellow!' she said to herself, but this time with the little tone of patronage which a girl of eighteen, conscious of graces and good looks, never shrinks from assuming toward an elder male, especially a male in love with someone else.

'I wonder whether he thinks he knows anything about Catherine.' But her own feeling, to-day was very soft and complex.