ing a still sore and throbbing
nerve, and had at last carried off a volume of Spenser.

And so the night began to wear away. For the first hour or two, every
now and then, a stifled sob would make itself just faintly heard. It was
a sound to wring the heart, for what it meant was that not even
Catherine Elsmere's extraordinary powers of self-suppression could avail
to check the outward expression of an inward torture. Each time it came
and went, it seemed to Elsmere that a fraction of his youth went with
it.

At last exhaustion brought her a restless sleep. As soon as Elsmere
caught the light breathing which told him she was not conscious of her
grief, or of him, his book slipped on to his knee.

'Open the temple gates unto my love,
Open them wide that she may enter in,
And all the posts adorn as doth behove,
And all the pillars deck with garlands trim,
For to receive this saint with honour due
That cometh in to you.
With trembling steps and humble reverence,
She cometh in before the Almighty's view.'

The leaves fell over as the book dropped, and these lines, which had
been to him, as to other lovers, the utterance of his own bridal joy,
emerged. They brought about him a host of images--a little gray church
penetrated everywhere by the roar of a swollen river; outside, a road
filled with empty farmers' carts, and shouting children carrying
branches of mountain-ash--winding on and up into the heart of wild hills
dyed with reddening fern, the sun-gleams stealing from crag to crag, and
shoulder to shoulder; inside, row after row of intent faces, all turned
towards the central passage, and, moving towards him, a figure 'clad all
in white, that seems a virgin best,' whose every step brings nearer to
him the heaven of his heart's desire. Everything is plain to him--Mrs.
Thornburgh's round cheeks and marvellous curls and jubilant airs, Mrs.
Leyburn's mild and tearful pleasure, the vicar's solid satisfaction.
With what confiding joy had those who loved her given her to him! And he
knows well that out of all griefs, the grief he has brought upon her in
two short years is the one which will seem to her hardest to bear. Very
few women of the present day could feel this particular calamity as
Catherine Elsmere must feel it.

'Was it a crime to love and win you, my darling?' he cried to her in his
heart. 'Ought I to have had more self-knowledge? could I have guessed
where I was t