old bull-terrier for guard and companion.  Rose generally carried a book on these occasions, and generally not a modern book.  Her governess had a terror of modern books, especially of novels.  She had looked into a few and shuddered.  Rose’s taste in literature was almost Elizabethan.  She was not allowed, of course, to glance at early English novels, which her governess classed with late English and American in point of morality, but no poetry except Byron was prohibited.

Rose loved to sit under a tree with the dog in a white coil beside her, and hold her book open on her lap and read a word now and then, and amuse herself with fancies the rest of the time.  She grew in those days of her early girlhood to have firm belief in those things which she never saw nor heard, and the belief had not wholly deserted her.  She never saw a wood-nymph stretch out a white arm from a tree, but she believed in the possibility of it, and the belief gave her a curious delight.  When she returned to the house for her scanty, elegantly served dinner with the three elder ladies, her eyes would be misty with these fancies and her mouth would wear the inscrutable smile of a baby’s at the charm of them.

When she first came to East Westland she was a profound mystery to Horace, who had only known well two distinct types of girls—­the purely provincial and her reverse.  Rose, with her mixture of the two, puzzled him.  While she was not in the least shy, she had a reserve which caused her to remain a secret to him for some time.  Rose’s inner life was to her something sacred, not to be lightly revealed.  At last, through occasional remarks and opinions, light began to shine through.  He had begun to understand her the Sunday he had followed her to Lucy Ayres’s.  He had, also, more than begun to love her.  Horace Allen would not have loved her so soon had she been more visible as to her inner self.  Things on the surface rarely interested him very much.  He had not an easily aroused temperament, and a veil which stimulated his imagination and aroused his searching instinct was really essential if he were to fall in love.  He had fallen in love before, he had supposed, although he had never asked one of the fair ones to marry him.  Now he began to call up various faces and wonder if this were not the first time.  All the faces seemed to dim before this present one.  He realized something in her very dear and precious, and for the first time he felt as if he could not forego possession.  Hitherto it had been easy enough to bear the slight wrench of leaving temptation and moving his tent.  Here it was different.  Still, the old objection remained.  How could he marry upon his slight salary?