Robert Elsmere

Unconsciously Langham retreated further and further into the comparative darkness of the inner room. He felt himself singularly insignificant and out of place, and he made no more efforts to talk. Rose played a violin solo, and played it with astonishing delicacy and fire. When it was over Langham saw her turn from the applauding circle crowding in upon her and throw a smiling interrogative look over her shoulder at Mr. Flaxman. Mr. Flaxman bent over her, and as he spoke Langham caught her flush, and the excited sparkle of her eyes. Was this the ‘someone in the stream?’ No doubt!—no doubt!

When the party broke up Langham found himself borne toward the outer room, and before he knew where he was going he was standing beside her.

‘Are you still here?’ she said to him, startled, as he held out his hand. He replied by some comments on the music, a little lumbering and infelicitous, as all his small-talk was. She hardly listened, but presently she looked up nervously, compelled as it were by the great melancholy eves above her.

We are not always in this turmoil Mr. Langham. Perhaps some other day you will come and make friends with my mother?’

CHAPTER XXXII.

Naturally, it was during their two months of autumn travel that Elsmere and Catherine first realized in detail what Elsmere’s act was to mean to them, as husband and wife, in the future. Each left England with the most tender and heroic resolves. And no one who knows anything of life will need to be told that even for these two finely natured people such resolves were infinitely easier to make than to carry out.

‘I will not preach to you—I will not persecute you!’ Catherine had said to her husband at the moment of her first shock and anguish. And she did her utmost, poor thing! to keep her word. All through the innumerable bitternesses which accompanied Elsmere’s withdrawal from Murewell—the letters which followed them, the remonstrances of public and private friends, the paragraphs which found their way, do what they would, into the newspapers—the pain of deserting, as it seemed to her, certain poor and helpless folk who had been taught to look to her and Robert, and whose bewildered lamentations came to them through young, Armitstead—through all this she held her peace; she did her best to soften Robert’s grief; she never once reproached him with her own.

But at the same time the inevitable separation of their inmost hopes and beliefs had thrown her back on herself, had immensely strengthened that Puritan independent fibre in her which her youth had developed, and which her happy marriage had only temporarily masked, not weakened. Never had Catherine believed so strongly and intensely as now, when the husband who had been the guide and inspirer of her religious life, had given up the old faith and practices. By virtue of a kind of nervous instinctive dread, his relaxations bred increased rigidity in her. Often when she was alone—or at night—she was seized with a lonely, an awful sense of responsibility. Oh! let her guard her faith, not only for her own sake, her child’s, her Lord’s, but for his that it might be given to her patience at last to lead him back.

And the only way in which it seemed to her possible to guard it was to set up certain barriers of silence. She feared that fiery persuasive quality in Robert she had so often seen at work on other people. With him conviction was life—it was the man himself, to an extraordinary degree. How was she to resist the pressure of those now ardors with which his mind was filling—she who loved him!—except by building, at any rate for the time, an inclosure of silence round her Christian beliefs? It was in some ways a pathetic repetition of the situation between Robert and the Squire in the early days of their friendship, but in Catherine’s mind there was no trembling presence of new knowledge conspiring from within with the forces without. At this moment of her life, she was more passionately convinced than ever that the only knowledge truly worth having in this world was: the knowledge of God’s mercies in Christ.

So, gradually, with a gentle persistency she withdrew certain parts of herself from Robert’s ken; she avoided certain subjects, or anything that might lead to them; she ignored the religious and philosophical books he was constantly reading; she prayed and thought alone—always for him, of him—but still resolutely alone. It was impossible, however, that so great a change in their life could be effected without a perpetual sense of breaking links, a perpetual series of dumb wounds and griefs on both sides. There came a moment, when, as he sat alone one evening in a pine wood above the Lake of Geneva, Elsmere suddenly awoke to the conviction that in spite of all his efforts and illusions, their relation to each other was altering, dwindling, impoverishing; the terror of that summer night at Murewell was being dismally justified.

His own mind during this time was in a state of perpetual discovery, ‘sailing the seas where there was never sand’—the vast shadowy seas of speculative thought. All his life, reserve to those nearest to him had been pain and grief to him. He was one of those people, as we know, who throw off readily; to whom sympathy, expansion, are indispensable; who suffer physically and mentally from anything cold and rigid beside them. And now, at every turn in their talk, their reading, in many of the smallest details of their common existence, Elsmere began to feel the presence of this cold and rigid something. He was ever conscious of self-defence on her side, of pained drawing back on his. And with every succeeding effort of his at self-repression, it seemed to him as though fresh nails were driven into the coffin of that old free habit of perfect confidence which had made the heaven of their life since they had been man and wife.

He sat on for long, through the September evening, pondering, wrestling. Was it simply inevitable, the natural result of his own act, and of her antecedents, to which he must submit himself, as to any mutilation or loss of power in the body? The young lover and husband rebelled—the believer rebelled—against the admission. Probably if his change had left him anchorless and forsaken, as it leaves many men, he would have been ready enough to submit, in terror lest his own forlornness should bring about hers. But in spite of the intellectual confusion which inevitably attends any wholesale reconstruction of a man’s platform of action, he had never been more sure of God, or the Divine aims of the world, than now; never more open than now, amid this exquisite Alpine world, to those passionate moments of religious trust which are man’s eternal defiance to the iron silences about him. Originally, as we know, he had shrunk from the thought of change in her corresponding to his own; now that his own foothold was strengthening, his longing for a new union was overpowering that old dread. The proselytizing instinct may be never quite morally defensible, even as between husband and wife. Nevertheless, in all strong, convinced, and ardent souls it exists, and must be reckoned with.

At last one evening he was overcome by a sudden impulse which neutralized for the moment his nervous dread of hurting her. Some little incident of their day together was rankling, and it was borne in upon him that almost any violent protest on her part would have been preferable to this constant soft evasion of hers, which was gradually, imperceptibly dividing heart from heart.

They were in a bare attic room at the very top of one of the huge newly-built hotels which during the last twenty years have invaded all the high places of Switzerland. The August, which had been so hot in England, had been rainy and broken in Switzerland. But it had been followed by a warm and mellow September, and the favorite hotels below a certain height were still full. When the Elsmeres arrived at Les Avants this scantily furnished garret out of which some servants had been hurried to make room for them, was all that could be found. They, however, liked it for its space and its view. They looked sideways from their windows on to the upper end of the lake, three thousand feet below them. Opposite, across the blue water, rose a grandiose rampart of mountains, the stage on which from morn till night the sun went through a long transformation scene of beauty. The water was marked every now and then by passing boats and steamers—tiny specks which served to measure the vastness of all around them. To right and left, spurs of green mountains shut out alike the lower lake and the icy splendors of the ‘Valais depths profound.’ What made the charm of the narrow prospect was, first, the sense it produced in the spectator of hanging dizzily above the lake, with infinite air below him, and, then, the magical effects of dawn and evening, when wreaths of mist would blot out the valley and the lake, and leave the eye of the watcher face to face across the fathomless abyss with the majestic mountain mass, and its attendant retinue of clouds, as though they and he were alone in the universe.

It was a peaceful September night. From the open window beside him, Robert could see a world of high moonlight, limited and invaded on all sides by sharp black masses of shade. A few rare lights glimmered on the spreading alp below, and every now and then a breath of music came to them wafted from a military band playing a mile or two away. They had been climbing most of the afternoon, and Catherine was lying down, her brown hair loose about her, the thin oval of her face and clear line of brow just visible in the dim candle-light.

Suddenly he stretched out his hand for his Greek Testament, which was always near him, though there had been no common reading since that bitter day of his confession to her. The mark still lay in the well-worn volume at the point reached in their last reading at Murewell. He opened upon it, and began the eleventh chapter of St. John.

Catherine trembled when she saw him take up the book. He began without preface, treating the passage before him in his usual way,—that is to say, taking verse after verse in the Greek, translating and commenting. She never spoke all through, and at last he closed the little Testament, and bent toward her, his look full of feeling.

‘Catherine! can’t you let me—will you never let me tell you, now, how that story—how the old things—affect me, from the new point of view? You always stop me when I try. I believe you think of me as having thrown it all away. Would it not comfort you sometimes, if you knew that although much of the Gospels, this very raising of Lazarus, for instance, seems to me no longer true in the historical sense, still they are always full to me of an ideal, a poetical truth? Lazarus may not have died and come to life, may never have existed; but still to me, now as always, love for Jesus of Nazareth is “resurrection” and “life?”’

He spoke with the most painful diffidence, the most wistful tenderness.

There was a pause. Then Catherine said, in a rigid, constrained voice,—

‘If the Gospels are not true in fact, as history, as reality, I cannot see how they are true at all, or of any value.’

The next minute she rose, and, going to the little wooden dressing-table, she began to brush out and plat for the night her straight silky veil of hair. As she passed him Robert saw her face pale and set.

He sat quiet another moment or two, and then he went toward her and took her in his arms.

‘Catherine,’ he said to her, his lips trembling, ‘am I never to speak my mind to you anymore? Do you mean always to hold me at arm’s length—to refuse always to hear what I have to say in defence of the change which has cost us both so much?’

She hesitated, trying hard to restrain herself. But it was of no use. She broke into tears—quiet but most bitter tears.

‘Robert, I cannot! Oh! you must see I cannot. It is not because I am hard, but because I am weak. How can I stand up against you? I dare not—I dare not. If you were not yourself—not my husband—’

Her voice dropped. Robert guessed that at the bottom of her resistance there was an intolerable fear of what love might do with her if she once gave it an opening. He felt himself cruel, brutal, and yet an urgent sense of all that was at stake drove him on.

‘I would not press or worry you, God knows!’ he said, almost piteously, kissing her forehead as she lay against him. ‘But remember, Catherine, I cannot put these things aside. I once thought I could—that I could fall back on my historical work, and leave religious matters alone as far as criticism was concerned. But I cannot. They fill my mind more and more. I feel more and more impelled to search them out, and to put my conclusions about them into shape. And all the time this is going on, are you and I to remain strangers to one another, and all that concerns our truest life—are we, Catherine?’

He spoke in a low voice of intense feeling. She turned her face and pressed her lips to his hand. Both had the scene in the wood-path after her flight and return in their minds, and both were filled with a despairing sense of the difficulty of living, not through great crises, but through the detail of every day.

‘Could you not work at other things?’ she whispered.

He was silent, looking straight before him into the moon-lit shimmer and white spectral hazes of the valley, his arms still round her.

‘No!’ he burst out at last; ‘not till I have satisfied myself. I feel it burning within me, like a command from God, to work out the problem, to make it clearer to myself—and to others,’ he added deliberately.

Her heart sank within her. The last words called up before her a dismal future of controversy and publicity, in which at every stop she would be condemning her husband.

‘And all this time, all these years, perhaps,’ he went on—before, in her perplexity, she could find words—‘is my wife never going to let me speak freely to her? Am I to act, think, judge, without her knowledge? Is she to know less of me than a friend, less even than the public for whom I write or speak?’

It seemed intolerable to him, all the more that every moment they stood there together it was being impressed upon him that in fact this was what she meant, what she had contemplated from the beginning.

‘Robert, I cannot defend myself against you,’ she cried, again clinging to him. ‘Oh, think for me! You know what I feel; that I dare not risk what is not mine!’

He kissed her again and then moved away from her to the window. It began to be plain to him that his effort was merely futile, and had better not have been made. But his heart was very sore.

‘Do you ever ask yourself—’ he said presently, looking steadily into the night—‘no, I don’t think you can, Catherine—what part the reasoning faculty, that faculty which marks us out from the animal, was meant to play in life? Did God give it to us simply that you might trample upon it and ignore it both in yourself and me?’

She had dropped into a chair, and sat with clasped hands, her hair falling about her white dressing-gown, and framing the nobly-featured face blanched by the moonlight. She did not attempt a reply, but the melancholy of an invincibly resolution, which was, so to speak, not her own doing, but rather was like a necessity imposed upon her from outside, breathed through her silence.

He turned and looked at her. She raised her arms, and the gesture reminded him for a moment of the Donatello figure in the Murewell library—the same delicate austere beauty, the same tenderness, the same underlying reserve. He took her outstretched hands and held them against his breast. His hotly-beating heart told him that he was perfectly right, and that to accept the barriers she was setting up would impoverish all their future life together. But he could not struggle with the woman on whom he had already inflicted so severe a practical trial. Moreover, he felt strangely as he stood there the danger of rousing in her those illimitable possibilities of the religious temper, the dread of which had once before risen spectre-like in his heart.

So once more he yielded. She rewarded him with all the charm, all the delightfulness, of which under the circumstances she was mistress. They wandered up the Rhone valley, through the St. Gothard, and spent a fortnight between Como and Lugano. During these days her one thought was to revive and refresh him, and he let her tend him, and lent himself to the various heroic futilities by which she would try as part of her nursing mission—to make the future look less empty and their distress less real. Of course under all this delicate give and take both suffered; both felt that the promise of their marriage had failed them, and that they had come dismally down to a second best. But after all they were young, and the autumn was beautiful—and though they hurt each other, they were alone together, and constantly, passionately, interested in each other. Italy, too, softened all things—even Catherine’s English tone and temper. As long as the delicious luxury of the Italian autumn, with all its primitive pagan suggestiveness, was still round them, as long as they were still among the cities of the Lombard plain—that battleground and highway of nations, which roused all Robert’s historical enthusiasm, and set him reading, discussing, thinking—in his old impetuous way—about something else than minute problems of Christian evidence, the newborn friction between them was necessarily reduced to a minimum.

But with their return home, with their plunge into London life, the difficulties of the situation began to define themselves more sharply. In after years, one of Catherine’s dreariest memories was the memory of their first instalment in the Bedford Square house. Robert’s anxiety to make it pleasant and homelike was pitiful to watch. He had none of the modern passion for upholstery, and probably the vaguest notions of what was æsthetically correct. But during their furnishing days, he was never tired of wandering about in search of pretty things—a rug, a screen, an engraving which might brighten the rooms in which Catherine was to live. He would put everything in its place with a restless eagerness, and then Catherine would be called in, and would play her part bravely. She would smile and ask questions, and admire, and then when Robert had gone, she would move slowly to the window and look out at the great mass of the British Museum frowning beyond the little dingy strip of garden, with a sick longing in her heart for the Murewell cornfield, the wood-path, the village, the free air-bathed spaces of heath and common. Oh! this huge London, with its unfathomable poverty and its heartless wealth—how it oppressed and bewildered her! Its mere grime and squalor, its murky, poisoned atmosphere were a perpetual trial to the country-woman brought up amid the dash of mountain streams and the scents of mountain pastures. She drooped physically for a time, as did the child.

But morally? With Catherine everything really depended on the moral state. She could have followed Robert to a London living with a joy and hope which would have completely deadened all these repulsions of the senses, now so active in her. But without this inner glow, in the presence of the profound spiritual difference circumstance had developed between her and the man she loved, everything was a burden. Even her religion, though she clung to it with an ever-increasing tenacity, failed at this period to bring her much comfort. Every night it seemed to her that the day had been one long and dreary struggle to make something out of nothing; and in the morning the night, too, seemed to have been alive with conflict—All Thy waves and Thy storms have gone over me!

Robert guessed it all, and whatever remorseful love could do to soften such a strain and burden he tried to do. He encouraged her to find work among the poor; he tried in the tenderest ways to interest her in the great spectacle of London life which was already, in spite of yearning and regret, beginning to fascinate and absorb himself. But their standards were now so different that she was constantly shrinking from what attracted him, or painfully judging what was to him merely curious and interesting. He was really more and more oppressed by her intellectual limitations, though never consciously would he have allowed himself to admit them, and she was more and more bewildered by what constantly seemed to her a breaking up of principles, a relaxation of moral fibre.

And the work among the poor was difficult. Robert instinctively felt that for him to offer his services in charitable work to the narrow Evangelical whose church Catherine had joined, would have been merely to invite rebuff. So that even in the love and care of the unfortunate they were separated. For he had not yet found a sphere of work, and if he had, Catherine’s invincible impulse in these matters was always to attach herself to the authorities and powers that be. He could only acquiesce when she suggested applying to Mr. Clarendon for some charitable occupation for herself.

After her letter to him, Catherine had an interview with the Vicar at his home. She was puzzled by the start and sudden pause for recollection with which he received her name, the tone of compassion which crept into his talk with her, the pitying look and grasp of the hand with which he dismissed her. Then, as she walked home, it flashed upon her that she had seen a copy, some weeks old, of the Record lying on the good man’s table, the very copy which contained Robert’s name among the list of men who during the last ten years had thrown up the Anglican ministry. The delicate face flushed miserably from brow to chin. Pitied for being Robert’s wife! Oh, monstrous!—incredible!

Meanwhile Robert, man-like, in spite of all the griefs and sorenesses of the position, had immeasurably the best of it. In the first place such incessant activity of mind as his is in itself both tonic and narcotic. It was constantly generating in him fresh purposes and hopes, constantly deadening regret, and pushing the old things out of sight. He was full of many projects literary and social, but they were all in truth the fruits of one long experimental process, the passionate attempt of the reason to justify to itself the God in whom the heart believed. Abstract thought, as Mr. Grey saw, had had comparatively little to do with Elsmere’s relinquishment of the Church of England. But as soon as the Christian bases of faith were overthrown, that faith had naturally to find for itself other supports and attachments. For faith itself—in God and a spiritual order—had been so wrought into the nature by years of reverent and adoring living, that nothing could destroy it. With Elsmere as with all men of religious temperament, belief in Christianity and faith in God had not at the outset been a matter of reasoning at all, but of sympathy, feeling, association, daily experience. Then the intellect had broken in, and destroyed or transformed the belief in Christianity. But after the crash, faith emerged as strong as ever, only craving and eager to make a fresh peace, a fresh compact with the reason.

Elsmere had heard Grey say long ago in one of the few moments of real intimacy he had enjoyed with him at Oxford, ‘My interest in philosophy springs solely from the chance it offers me of knowing something more of God!’ Driven by the same thirst he too threw himself into the same quest, pushing his way laboriously through the philosophical border-lands of science, through the ethical speculation of the day, through the history of man’s moral and religious past. And while on the one hand the intellect was able to contribute an ever stronger support to the faith which was the man; on the other, the sphere in him of a patient ignorance, which abstains from all attempts at knowing what man cannot know, and substitutes trust for either knowledge or despair, was perpetually widening. ‘I take my stand on conscience and the moral life!’ was the upshot of it all. ‘In them I find my God! As for all these various problems, ethical and scientific, which you press upon me, my pessimist friend, I, too, am bewildered; I, too, have no explanations to offer. But I trust and wait. In spite of them—beyond them—I have abundantly enough for faith—for hope—for action!’

We may quote a passage or two from some letters of his written at this time to that young Armitstead who had taken his place at Murewell and was still there till Mowbray Elsmere should appoint a new man. Armitstead had been a college friend of Elsmere’s. He was a High Churchman of a singularly gentle and delicate type, and the manner in which he had received Elsmere’s story on the day of his arrival at Murewell had permanently endeared him to the teller of it. At the same time the defection from Christianity of a man who at Oxford had been to him the object of much hero-worship, and, since Oxford, an example of pastoral efficiency, had painfully affected young Armitstead, and he began a correspondence with Robert which was in many ways a relief to both. In Switzerland and Italy, when his wife’s gentle inexorable silence became too oppressive to him, Robert would pour himself out in letters to Armitstead, and the correspondence did not altogether cease with his return to London. To the Squire during the same period Elsmere also wrote frequently, but rarely or never on religious matters.

On one occasion Armitstead had been pressing the favorite Christian dilemma—Christianity or nothing. Inside Christianity, light and certainly; outside it, chaos. ‘If it were not for the Gospels and the Church I should be a Positivist to-morrow. Your Theism is a mere arbitrary hypothesis, at the mercy of any rival philosophical theory. How, regarding our position as precarious, you should come to regard your own as stable, is to me incomprehensible!’

‘What I conceive to be the vital difference between Theism and Christianity,’ wrote Elsmere in reply, ‘is that as an explanation of things Theism can never be disproved. At the worst it must always remain in the position of an alternative hypothesis, which the hostile man of science cannot destroy, though he is under no obligation to adopt it. Broadly speaking, it is not the facts which are in dispute, but the inference to be drawn from them.’

‘Now, considering the enormous complication of the facts, the Theistic inference will, to put it at the lowest, always have its place, always command respect. The man of science may not adopt it, but by no advance of science that I, at any rate, can foresee, can it be driven out of the field.

‘Christianity is in a totally different position. Its grounds are not philosophical but literary and historical. It rests not upon all fact, but upon a special group of facts. It is and will always remain, a great literary and historical problem, a question of documents and testimony. Hence, the Christian explanation is vulnerable in a way in which the Theistic explanation can never be vulnerable. The contention at any rate, of persons in my position is: That to the man who has had the special training required, and in whom this training has not been neutralized by any overwhelming bias of temperament, it can be as clearly demonstrated that the miraculous Christian story rests on a tissue of mistake, as it can be demonstrated that the Isidorian Decretals were a forgery, or the correspondence of Paul and Seneca a pious fraud, or that the mediæval belief in witchcraft was the product of physical ignorance and superstition.’

‘You say,’ he wrote again, in another connection, to Armitstead from Milan, ‘you say you think my later letters have been far too aggressive and positive. I, too, am astonished at myself. I do not know my own mood, it is so clear, so sharp, so combative. Is it the spectacle of Italy, I wonder—of a country practically without religion—the spectacle in fact of Latin Europe as a whole, ad the practical Atheism in which it is engulfed? My dear friend, the problem of the world at this moment is—how to find a religion?—some great conception which shall be once more capable, as the old was capable, of welding societies, and keeping man’s brutish elements in check. Surely Christianity of the traditional sort is failing everywhere—less obviously with us, and in Teutonic Europe generally, but notoriously, in all the Catholic countries. We talk complacently of the decline of Buddhism. But what have we to say of the decline of Christianity? And yet this last is infinitely more striking and more tragic, inasmuch as it affects a more important section of mankind. I, at any rate, am not one of those who would seek to minimize the results of this decline for human life, nor can I bring myself to believe that Positivism or “evolutional morality” will ever satisfy the race.’

‘In the period of social struggle which undeniably lies before us, both in the old and the new world, are we then to witness a war of classes, unsoftened by the ideal hopes, the ideal law, of faith? It looks like it. What does the artisan class, what does the town democracy throughout Europe, care any longer for Christian checks or Christian sanctions as they have been taught to understand them? Superstition, in certain parts of rural Europe, there is in plenty, but wherever you get intelligence and therefore movement, you got at once either indifference to, or a passionate break with Christianity. And consider what it means, what it will mean, this Atheism of the great democracies which are to be our masters! The world has never seen anything like it; such spiritual anarchy and poverty combined with such material power and resource. Every society—Christian and non-Christian—has always till now had its ideal, of greater or less ethical value, its appeal to something beyond man. Has Christianity brought us to this: that the Christian nations are to be the first in the world’s history to try the experiment of a life without faith—that life which you and I, at any rate, are agreed in thinking a life worthy only of the brute?

‘Oh forgive me! These things must hurt you—they would have hurt me in old days—but they burn within me, and you bid me speak out. What if it be God himself who is driving His painful lesson home to me, to you, to the world? What does it mean: this gradual growth of what we call infidelity, of criticism and science on the one hand, this gradual death of the old traditions on the other? Sin, you answer, the enmity of the human mind against God, the momentary triumph of Satan. And so you acquiesce, heavy-hearted, in God’s present defeat, looking for vengeance and requital here-after. I am not so ready to believe in man’s capacity to rebel against his Maker! Where you see ruin and sin, I see the urgent process of Divine education, God’s steady ineluctable command “to put away childish things,” the pressure of His spirit on ours toward new ways of worship and new forms of love!’

And after a while it was with these ‘new ways of worship and now forms of love’ that the mind began to be perpetually occupied. The break with the old things was no sooner complete, than the eager soul, incapable then, as always, of resting in negation or oppositions pressed passionately forward to a new synthesis, not only speculative, but practical. Before it rose perpetually the haunting vision of another palace of faith—another church or company of the faithful, which was to become the shelter of human aspiration amid the desolation and anarchy caused by the crashing of the old! How many men and women must have gone through the same strait as itself—how many must be watching with it through the darkness for the rising of a new City of God!

One afternoon, close upon Christmas, he found himself in Parliament Square, on his way toward Westminster Bridge and the Embankment. The beauty of a sunset sky behind the Abbey arrested him, and he stood leaning over the railings beside the Peel statue to look.

The day before, he had passed the same spot with a German friend. His companion—a man of influence and mark in his own country, who had been brought up however in England and knew it well—had stopped before the Abbey and had said to him with emphasis: ‘I never find myself in this particular spot of London without a sense of emotion and reverence. Other people feel that in treading the Forum of Rome they are at the centre of human things. I am more thrilled by Westminster than Rome; your venerable Abbey is to me the symbol of a nationality to which the modern world owes obligations it can never repay. You are rooted deep in the past; you have also a future of infinite expansiveness stretching before you. Among European nations at this moment you alone have freedom in the true sense, you alone have religion. I would give a year of life to know what you will have made of your freedom and your religion two hundred years hence!’

As Robert recalled the words, the Abbey lay before him, wrapped in the bluish haze of the winter afternoon. Only the towers rose out of the mist, gray and black against the red bands of cloud. A pair of pigeons circled round them, as careless and free in flight as though they were alone with the towers and the sunset. Below, the streets were full of people; the omnibuses rolled to and fro; the lamps were just lit; lines of straggling figures, dark in the half light, were crossing the street here and there. And to all the human rush and swirl below, the quiet of the Abbey and the infinite red distances of sky gave a peculiar pathos and significance.

Robert filled his eye and sense, and then walked quickly away toward the Embankment. Carrying the poetry and grandeur of England’s past with him, he turned his face east-ward to the great new-made London on the other side of St. Paul’s, the London of the democracy, of the nineteenth century, and of the future. He was wrestling with himself, a prey to one of those critical moments of life, when circumstance seems once more to restore to us the power of choice, of distributing a Yes or a No among the great solicitations which meet the human spirit on its path from silence to silence. The thought of his friend’s reverence, and of his own personal debt toward the country to whose long travail of centuries he owed all his own joys and faculties, was hot within him.

Ah! that vast chaotic London south and east of the great church! He already knew something of it. A Liberal clergyman there, settled in the very blackest, busiest heart of it, had already made him welcome on Mr. Grey’s introduction. He had gone with this good man on several occasions through some little fraction of that teeming world, now so hidden and peaceful between the murky river mists and the cleaner light-filled rays of the sky. He had heard much, and pondered a good deal, the quick mind caught at once by the differences, some tragic, some merely curious and stimulating, between the monotonous life of his own rural folk, and the mad rush, the voracious hurry, the bewildering appearances and disappearances, the sudden engulfments, of working London.

Moreover, he had spent a Sunday or two wandering among the East End churches. There, rather than among the streets and courts outside, as it had seemed to him, lay the tragedy of the city. Such emptiness, such desertion, such a hopeless breach between the great craving need outside and the boon offered it within! Here and there, indeed, a patch of bright colored success, as it claimed to be, where the primitive tendency of man toward the organized excitement of religious ritual, visible in all nations and civilizations, had been appealed to with more energy and more results than usual. But in general, blank failure, or rather obvious want of success—as the devoted men now beating the void there were themselves the first to admit, with pain, and patient submission to the inscrutable Will of God.

But is it not time we assured ourselves, he was always asking, whether God is still in truth behind the offer man is perpetually making to his brother man on His behalf? He was behind it once, and it had efficacy, had power. But now—What if all these processes of so-called destruction and decay were but the mere workings of that divine plastic force which is forever moulding human society? What if these beautiful venerable things which had fallen from him, as from thousands of his follows, represented, in the present stage of the world’s history, not the props, but the hinderances, of man?

And if all these large things were true, as he believed, what should be the individual’s part in this transition England? Surely, at the least, a part of plain sincerity of act and speech—a correspondence as perfect as could be reached between the inner faith and the outer word and deed. So much, at the least, was clearly required of him!

‘Do not imagine,’ he said to himself, as though with a fierce dread of possible self-delusion, ‘that it is in you to play any great, any commanding part. Shun the thought of it, if it were possible! But let me do what is given me to do! Here in this human wilderness, may I spend whatever of time or energy or faculty may be mine, in the faithful attempt to help forward the new House of Faith that is to be, though my utmost efforts should but succeed in laying some obscure stone in still unseen foundations! Let me try and hand on to some other human soul, or souls, before I die, the truth which has freed, and which is now sustaining my own heart. Can any do more? Is not every man who feels any certainty in him, whatever, bound to do as much? What matter if the wise folk scoff, if even at times, and in a certain sense, one seem to oneself ridiculous—absurdly lonely and powerless! All great changes are preceded by numbers of sporadic, and as the bystander thinks, impotent efforts. But while the individual effort sinks, drowned perhaps in mockery, the general movement quickens, gathers force we know not how, and—’

Darkness sank over the river; all the gray and purple distance with its dim edge of spires and domes against the sky, all the vague intervening blackness of street, or bridge or railway station were starred and patterned with lights. The vastness, the beauty of the city filled him with a sense of mysterious attraction, and as he walked on with his face uplifted to it, it was as though he took his life in his hand and flung it afresh into the human gulf.

‘What does it matter if one’s work be raw and uncomely! All that lies outside the great organized traditions of an age must always look so. Let me bear my witness bravely, not spending life in speech, but not undervaluing speech—above all, not being ashamed or afraid of it, because other wise people may prefer a policy of silence. A man has but the one pure life, the one tiny spark of faith. Better be venturesome with both for God’s sake, than over-cautious, over-thrifty. And—to his own Master he standeth or falleth!’

Plans of work of all kinds, literary and practical, thoughts of preaching in some bare bidden room to men and women orphaned and strangled like himself, began to crowd upon him. The old clerical instinct in him winced at some of them. Robert had nothing of the sectary about him by nature; he was always too deeply and easily affected by the great historic existences about him. But when the Oxford man or the ex-official of one of the most venerable and decorous of societies protested, the believer, or, if you will, the enthusiast, put the protest by.

And so the dream gathered substance and stayed with him, till at last he found himself at his own door. As he closed it behind him, Catherine came out into the pretty old hall from the dining-room.

‘Robert, have you walked all the way?’

‘Yes. I came along the Embankment. Such a beautiful evening!’

He slipped his arm inside hers, and they mounted the stairs together. She glanced at him wistfully. She was perfectly aware that these months were to him months of incessant travail of spirit, and she caught at this moment the old strenuous look of eye and brow she knew so well. A year ago, and every thought of his mind had been open to her—and now—she herself had shut them out—but her heart sank within her.

She turned and kissed him. He bent his head fondly over her. But inwardly all the ardor of his mood collapsed at the touch of her. For the protest of a world in arms can be withstood with joy, but the protest that steals into your heart, that takes love’s garb and uses love’s ways—there is the difficulty!

CHAPTER XXXIII.

But Robert was some time in finding his opening, in realizing any fraction of his dream. At first he tried work under the Broad Church Vicar to whom Grey had introduced him. He undertook some rent-collecting, and some evening lectures on elementary science to boys and men. But after a while he began to feel his position false and unsatisfactory. In truth, his opinions were in the main identical with those of the Vicar under whom he was acting. But Mr. Vernon was a Broad Churchman, belonged to the Church Reform movement, and thought it absolutely necessary to ‘keep things going,’ and by a policy of prudent silence and gradual expansion from within, to save the great ‘plant’ of the Establishment from falling wholesale into the hands of the High Churchmen. In consequence, he was involved, as Robert held, in endless contradictions and practical falsities of speech and action. His large church was attended by a handful of some fifty to a hundred persons. Vernon could not preach what he did believe, and would not preach, more than what was absolutely necessary, what he did not believe. He was hard-working and kind-hearted, but the perpetual divorce between thought and action, which his position made inevitable, was constantly blunting and weakening all he did. His whole life, indeed, was one long waste of power, simply for lack of an elementary frankness.

But if these became Robert’s views as to Vernon, Vernon’s feeling toward Elsmere after six weeks’ acquaintance was not less decided. He was constitutionally timid, and he probably divined in his new helper a man of no ordinary calibre, whose influence might very well turn out some day to be of the ‘incalculably diffusive’ kind. He grew uncomfortable, begged Elsmere to beware of any ‘direct religious teaching,’ talked in warm praise of a ‘policy of omissions,’ and in equally warm denunciation of ‘anything like a policy of attack.’ In short, it became plain that two men so much alike and yet so different, could not long co-operate.

However, just as the fact was being brought home to Elsmere, a friendly chance intervened.

Hugh Flaxman, the Leyburns’ new acquaintance and Lady Helen’s brother, had been drawn to Elsmere at first sight; and a meeting or two, now at Lady Charlotte’s, now at the Leyburns’, had led both men far on the way to a friendship. Of Hugh Flaxman himself more hereafter. At present all that need be recorded is that it was at Mr. Flaxman’s house, overlooking St. James’s Park, Robert first met a man who was to give him the opening for which he was looking.

Mr. Flaxman was fond of breakfast parties à la Rogers, and on the first occasion when Robert could be induced to attend one of these functions, he saw opposite to him what he supposed to be a lad of twenty, a young slip of a fellow, whose sallies of fun and invincible good humor attracted him greatly.

Sparkling brown eyes, full lips rich in humor and pugnacity, ‘lockës crull as they were layde in presse,’ the same look of ‘wonderly’ activity too, in spite of his short stature and dainty make, as Chaucer lends his Squire—the type was so fresh ad pleasing that Robert was more and more held by it, especially when he discovered to his bewilderment that the supposed stripling must be from his talk a man quite as old as himself, an official besides, filling what was clearly some important place in the world. He took his full share in the politics and literature started at the table, and presently, when conversation fell on the proposed municipality for London, said things to which the whole party listened. Robert’s curiosity was aroused, and after breakfast he questioned his host and was promptly introduced to ‘Mr. Murray Edwardes.’

Whereupon it turned out that this baby-faced sage was filling a post, in the work of which perhaps few people in London could have taken so much interest as Robert Elsmere.

Fifty years before, a wealthy merchant who had been one of the chief pillars of London Unitarianism had made his will and died. His great warehouses lay in one of the Eastern riverside districts of the city, and in his will he endeavored to do something according to his lights for the place in which he had amassed his money. He left a fairly large bequest wherewith to build and endow a Unitarian chapel and found certain Unitarian charities, in the heart of what was even then one of the densest and most poverty-stricken of London parishes. For a long time, however, chapel and charities seemed likely to rank as one of the idle freaks of religious wealth and nothing more. Unitarianism of the old sort is perhaps the most illogical creed that exists, and certainly it has never been the creed of the poor. In old days it required the presence of a certain arid stratum of the middle classes to live and thrive at all. This stratum was not to be found in R——, which rejoiced instead in the most squalid types of poverty and crime, types wherewith the mild shrivelled Unitarian minister had about as much power of grappling as a Poet Laureate with a Trafalgar Square Socialist.

Soon after the erection of the chapel, there arose that shaking of the dry bones of religious England which we call the Tractarian movement. For many years the new force left R—— quite undisturbed. The parish church droned away, the Unitarian minister preached decorously to empty benches, knowing nothing of the agitations outside. At last however, toward the end of the old minister’s life, a powerful church of the new type, staffed by friends and pupils of Pussy, rose in the centre of R——, and the little Unitarian chapel was for a time more snuffed out than ever, a fate which this time it shared dismally with the parish church. As generally happened, however, in those days, the proceedings at this now and splendid St. Wilfrid’s were not long in stirring up the Protestantism of the British rough,—the said Protestantism being always one of the finest excuses for brickbats of which the modern cockney is master. The parish lapsed into a state of private war—hectic clergy heading exasperated processions or intoning defiant Litanies on the one side,—mobs, rotten eggs, dead cats, and blatant Protestant orators on the other.

The war went on practically for years, and while it was still raging, the minister of the Unitarian chapel died, and the authorities concerned chose in his place a young fellow, the son of a Bristol minister, a Cambridge man besides, as chance would have it, of brilliant attainments, and unusually commended from many quarters, even including some Church ones of the Liberal kind. This curly-haired youth, as he was then in reality, and as to his own quaint vexation he went on seeming to be up to quite middle age, had the wit to perceive at the moment of his entry on the troubled scene that behind all the mere brutal opposition to the new church, and in contrast with the sheer indifference of three-fourths of the district, there was a small party consisting of an aristocracy of the artisans, whose protest against the Puseyite doings was of a much quieter, sterner sort, and among whom the uproar had mainly roused a certain crude power of thinking. He threw himself upon this element, which he rather divined than discovered, and it responded. He preached a simple creed, drove it home by pure and generous living; he lectured, taught, brought down workers from the West End, and before he had been five years in the harness had not only made himself a power in R——, but was beginning to be heard of and watched with no small interest by many outsiders.

This was the man on whom Robert had now stumbled. Before they had talked twenty minutes each was fascinated by the other. They said good-by to their host, and wandered out together into St. James’s Park, where the trees were white with frost and an orange sun was struggling through the fog. Here Murray Edwardes poured out the whole story of his ministry to attentive ears. Robert listened eagerly. Unitarianism was not a familiar subject of thought to him. He had never dreamt of joining the Unitarians, and was indeed long ago convinced that in the beliefs of a Channing no one once fairly started on the critical road could rationally stop. That common thinness and aridity too of the Unitarian temper had weighed with him. But here, in the person of Murray Edwardes, it was as though he saw something old and threadbare revivified. The young man’s creed, as he presented it, had grace, persuasiveness even unction: and there was something in his tone of mind which was like a fresh wind blowing over the fevered places of the other’s heart.

They talked long and earnestly, Edwardes describing his own work, and the changes creeping over the modern Unitarian body, Elsmere saying little, asking much.

At last the young man looked at Elsmere with eyes of bright decision.

‘You cannot work with the Church!’ he said—‘it is impossible. You will only wear yourself out in efforts to restrain what you could do infinitely more good, as things stand now, by pouring out. Come to us!—I will put you in the way. You shall be hampered by no pledges of any sort. Come and take the direction of some of my workers. We have all got our hands more than full. Your knowledge, your experience, would be invaluable. There is no other opening like it in England just now for men of your way of thinking and mine. Come! Who knows what we may be putting our Hands to—what fruit may grow from the smallest seed?’

The two men stopped beside the lightly frozen water. Robert gathered that in this soul, too, there had risen the same large intoxicating dream of a reorganized Christendom, a new wide-spreading, shelter of faith for discouraged, brow-beaten man, as in his own. ‘I will!’ he said briefly, after a pause, his own look kindling—‘it is the opening I have been pining for. I will give you all I can, and bless you for the chance.’

That evening Robert got home late after a busy day full of various engagements. Mary, after some waiting up for ‘Fader,’ had just been carried protesting, red lips pouting, and fat legs kicking, off to bed. Catherine was straightening the room, which had been thrown into confusion by the child’s romps.

It was with an effort—for he knew it would be a shock to her—that he began to talk to her about the breakfast-party at Mr. Flaxman’s, and his talk with Murray Edwardes. But he had made it a rule with himself to tell her everything that he was doing or meant to do. She would not let him tell her what he was thinking. But as much openness as there could be between them, there should be.

Catherine listened—still moving about the while—the thin beautiful lips becoming more and more compressed. Yes, it was hard to her, very hard; the people among whom she had been brought up, her father especially, would have held out the hand of fellowship to any body of Christian people, but not to the Unitarian. No real barrier of feeling divided them from any orthodox Dissenter, but the gulf between them and the Unitarian had been dug very deep by various forces—forces of thought originally, of strong habit and prejudice in the course of time.

‘He is going to work with them now,’ she thought bitterly; ‘soon he will be one of them—perhaps a Unitarian minister himself.’

And for the life of her, as he told his tale, she could find nothing but embarrassed monosyllables, and still more embarrassed silences, wherewith to answer him. Till at last he too fell silent, feeling once more the sting of a now habitual discomfort.

Presently, however, Catherine came to sit down beside him. She laid her head against his knee, saying nothing; but gathering his hand closely in both her own.

Poor woman’s heart! One moment in rebellion, the next a suppliant. He bent down quickly and kissed her.

‘Would you like,’ he said presently, after both had sat silent awhile in the firelight, ‘would you care to go to Madame de Netteville’s to-night?’

‘By all means’ said Catherine, with a sort of eagerness. It was Friday she asked us for, wasn’t it? We will be quick over dinner, and I will go and dress.’

In that last ten minutes which Robert had spent with the Squire in his bedroom, on the Monday afternoon, when they were to have walked, Mr. Wendover had dryly recommended Elsmere to cultivate Madame de Netteville. He sat propped up in his chair, white, gaunt, and cynical, and this remark of his was almost the only reference he would allow to the Elsmere move.

‘You had better go there,’ he said huskily, ‘it will do you good. She gets the first-rate people and she makes them talk, which Lady Charlotte can’t. Too many fools at Lady Charlotte’s; she waters the wine too much.’

And he had persisted with the subject—using it as Elsmere thought, as a means of warding off other conversation. He would not ask Elsmere’s plans, and he would not allow a word about himself.

There had been a heart attack, old Meyrick thought, coupled with signs of nervous strain and excitement. It was the last ailment which evidently troubled the doctor most. But behind the physical breakdown, there was to Robert’s sense something else, a spiritual something, infinitely forlorn and piteous, which revealed itself wholly against the elder man’s will, and filled the younger with a dumb helpless rush of sympathy. Since his departure Robert had made the keeping up of his correspondence with the Squire a binding obligation, and he was to-night chiefly anxious to go to Madame de Netteville’s that he might write an account of it to Murewell.

Still the Squire’s talk, and his own glimpse of her at Murewell, had made him curious to see more of the woman herself. The Squire’s ways of describing her were always half approving, half sarcastic. Robert sometimes imagined that he himself had been at one time more under her spell than he cared to confess. If so, it must have been when she was still in Paris, the young English widow of a man of old French family, rich, fascinating, distinguished, and the centre of a small salon, admission to which was one of the social blue ribbons of Paris.

Since the war of 1870 Madame de Netteville had fixed her headquarters in London, and it was to her house in Hans Place that the Squire wrote to her about the Elsmeres. She owed Roger Wendover debts of various kinds, and she had an encouraging memory of the young clergyman on the terrace at Murewell. So she promptly left her cards, together with the intimation that she was at home always on Friday evenings.

‘I have never seen the wife,’ she meditated, as her delicate jewelled hand drew up the window of the brougham in front of Elsmere’s lodgings. ‘But if she is the ordinary country clergyman’s spouse, the Squire of course will have given the young man a hint.’

But whether from oblivion, or from some instinct of grim humor toward Catherine, whom he had always vaguely disliked, the Squire said not one word about his wife to Robert, in the course of their talk of Madame de Netteville.

Catherine took pains with her dress, sorely wishing to do Robert credit. She put on one of the gowns she had taken to Murewell when she married. It was black, simply made, and had been a favorite with both of them in the old surroundings.

So they drove off to Madame de Netteville’s. Catherine’s heart was beating faster than usual as she mounted the twisting stairs of the luxurious little house. All these new social experiences were a trial to her. But she had the vaguest, most unsuspicious ideas of what she was to see in this particular house.

A long low room was thrown open to them. Unlike most English rooms, it was barely though richly furnished. A Persian carpet of self-colored grayish blue, threw the gilt French chairs and the various figures sitting upon them into delicate relief. The walls were painted white, and had a few French mirrors and girandoles upon them, half a dozen fine French portraits, too, here and there, let into the wall in oval frames. The subdued light came from the white sides of the room, and seemed to be there solely for social purposes. You could hardly have read or written in the room, but you could see a beautiful woman in a beautiful dress there, and you could talk there, either tête-à-tête or to the assembled company, to perfection, so cunningly was it all devised.

When the Elsmeres entered, there were about a dozen people present—ten gentleman and two ladies. One of the ladies, Madame de Netteville, was lying back in the corner of a velvet divan placed against the wall, a screen between her and a splendid fire that threw its blaze out into the room. The other, a slim woman with closely curled fair hair, and a neck abnormally long and white, sat near her, and the circle of men were talking indiscriminately to both.

As the footman announced Mr. and Mrs. Elsmere, there was a general stir of surprise. The men looked round; Madame de Netteville half rose with a puzzled look. It was more than a month since she had dropped her invitation. Then a flash, not altogether of pleasure, passed over her face, and she said a few hasty words to the woman near her, advancing the moment afterward to give her hand to Catherine.

‘This is very kind of you, Mrs. Elsmere, to remember me so soon. I had imagined you were hardly settled enough yet to give me the pleasure of seeing you.’

But the eyes fixed on Catherine, eyes which took in everything, were not cordial for all their smile.

Catherine, looking up at her, was overpowered by her excessive manner, and by the woman’s look of conscious sarcastic strength, struggling through all the outer softness of beauty and exquisite dress.

‘Mr. Elsmere, you will find this room almost as hot, I am afraid, as that afternoon on which we met last. Let me introduce you to Count Wielandt—Mr. Elsmere. Mrs. Elsmere, will you come over here, beside Lady Aubrey Willert?’

Robert found himself bowing to a young diplomatist, who seemed to him to look at him very much as he himself might have scrutinized an inhabitant of New Guinea. Lady Aubrey made an imperceptible movement of the head as Catherine was presented to her, and Madame de Netteville, smiling and biting her lip a little, fell back into her seat.

There was a faint odor of smoke in the room. As Catherine sat down, a young exquisite a few yards from her threw the end of a cigarette into the fire with a little sharp decided gesture. Lady Aubrey also pushed away a cigarette case which lay beside her hand.

Everybody there had the air more or less of an habitué of the house; and when the conversation began again, the Elsmeres found it very hard, in spite of certain perfunctory efforts on the part of Madame de Netteville, to take any share in it.

‘Well, I believe the story about Desforêts is true,’ said the fair-haired young Apollo, who had thrown away his cigarette, lolling back in his chair.

Catherine started, the little scene with Rose and Langham in the English rectory garden flashing incongruously back upon her.

‘If you got it from The Ferret, my dear Evershed,’ said the ex-Tory minister, Lord Rupert, ‘you may put it down as a safe lie. As for me, I believe she has a much shrewder eye to the main chance.’

‘What do you mean?’ said the other, raising astonished eyebrows.

‘Well, it doesn’t pay, you know, to write yourself down a fiend—not quite.’

‘What—you think it will affect her audiences? Well, that is a good joke!’ and the young man laughed immoderately joined by several of the other guests.

‘I don’t imagine it will make any difference to you, my good friend,’ returned Lord Rupert imperturbably; ‘but the British public haven’t got your nerve. They may take it awkwardly—I don’t say they will—when a woman who has turned her own young sister out of doors at night, in St. Petersburg, so that ultimately as a consequence the girl dies—comes to ask them to clap her touching impersonations of injured virtue.’

‘What has one to do with an actress’ private life, my dear Lord Rupert?’ asked Madame de Netteville, her voice slipping with a smooth clearness into the conversation, her eyes darting light from under straight black brows.

‘What indeed!’ said the young man who had begun the conversation, with a disagreeable enigmatical smile, stretching his hand for another cigarette, and drawing it back out with a look under his drooped eyelids—a look of cold impertinent scrutiny—at Catherine Elsmere.

‘Ah! well—I don’t want to be obtrusively moral—Heaven Forbid! But there is such a thing as destroying the illusion to such an extent that you injure your pocket. Desforêts is doing it—doing it actually in Paris too.’

There was a ripple of laughter.

‘Paris and illusions—O mon Dieu!’ groaned young, Evershed, when he had done laughing, laying meditative hands on his knees and gazing into the fire.

‘I tell you I have seen it,’ said Lord Rupert, waxing combative, and slapping the leg he was nursing with emphasis. ‘The last time I went to see Desforêts in Paris the theatre was crammed, and the house—theatrically speaking—ice. They received her in dead, silence—they gave her not one single recall—and they only gave her a clap, that I can remember, at those two or three points in the play where clap they positively must or burst. They go to see her—but they loathe her—and they let her know it.’

‘Bah!’ said his opponent, ‘it is only because they are tired of her. Her vagaries don’t amuse them any longer—they know them by heart. And—by George! she has some pretty rivals too, now!’ he added reflectively,—‘not to speak of the Bernhardt.’

‘Well, the Parisians can be shocked,’ said Count Wielandt in excellent English, bending forward so as to get a good view of his hostess. ‘They are just now especially shocked by the condition of English morals!’

The twinkle in his eye was irresistible. The men, understanding his reference to the avidity with which certain English aristocratic scandals had been lately seized upon by the French papers, laughed out—so did Lady Aubrey. Madame de Netteville contented herself with a smile.

‘They profess to be shocked, too, by Renan’s last book,’ said the editor from the other side of the room.

‘Dear me!’ said Lady Aubrey, with meditative scorn, fanning herself lightly the while, her thin but extraordinarily graceful head and neck thrown out against the golden brocade of the cushion behind her.

‘Oh! what so many of them feel in Renan’s case, of course’ said Madame de Netteville, ‘is that every book he writes now gives a fresh opening to the enemy to blaspheme. Your eminent freethinker can’t afford just yet, in the present state of the world, to make himself socially ridiculous. The cause suffers.’

‘Just my feeling,’ said young Evershed calmly. ‘Though I mayn’t care a rap about him personally, I prefer that a man on my own front bench shouldn’t make a public ass of himself if he can help it—not for his sake, of course, but for mine!’

Robert looked at Catherine. She sat upright by the side of Lady Aubrey; her face, of which the beauty tonight seemed lost in rigidity, pale and stiff. With a contraction of heart he plunged himself into the conversation. On his road home that evening he had found an important foreign telegram posted up at the small literary club to which he had belonged since Oxford days. He made a remark about it now to Count Wielandt; and the diplomatist, turning rather unwillingly to face his questioner, recognized that the remark was a shrewd one.

Presently the young man’s frank intelligence had told. On his way to and from the Holy Land three years before, Robert had seen something of the East, and it so happened that he remembered the name of Count Wielandt as one of the foreign secretaries of legation present at an official party given by the English Ambassador at Constantinople, which he and his mother had attended on their return journey, in virtue of a family connection with the Ambassador. All that he could glean from memory he made quick use of now, urged at first by the remorseful wish to make this new world into which he had brought Catherine less difficult than he knew it must have been during the last quarter of an hour.

But after a while he found himself leading the talk of a section of the room, and getting excitement and pleasure out of the talk itself. Ever since that Eastern journey he had kept an eye on the subjects which had interested him then, reading in his rapid voracious way all that came across him at Murewell, especially in the Squire’s foreign newspapers and reviews, and storing it when read in a remarkable memory.

Catherine, after the failure of some conversational attempts between her and Madame de Netteville, fell to watching her husband with a start of strangeness and surprise. She had scarcely seen him at Oxford among his equals; and she had very rarely been present at his talks with the Squire. In some ways, and owing to the instinctive reserves set up between them for so long, her intellectual knowledge of him was very imperfect. His ease, his resource among these men of the world, for whom—independent of all else—she felt a country-woman’s dislike, filled her with a kind of bewilderment.

‘Are you new to London?’ Lady Aubrey asked her presently, in that tone of absolute detachment from the person addressed which certain women manage to perfection. She, too, had been watching the husband, and the sight had impressed her with a momentary curiosity to know what the stiff, handsome, dowdily-dressed wife was made of.

‘We have been two months here,’ said Catherine, her large gray eyes taking in her companion’s very bare shoulders, the costly fantastic dress, and the diamonds flashing against the white skin.