rt of the winter.'

She acquiesced silently. How mean and shrunken a future it seemed to
them both, beside the wide and honourable range of his clergyman's life
as he and she had developed it. But she did not dwell long on that. Her
thoughts were suddenly invaded by the memory of a cottage tragedy in
which she had recently taken a prominent part. A girl, a child of
fifteen, from one of the crowded Mile End hovels, had gone at Christmas
to a distant farm as servant, and come back a month ago, ruined, the
victim of an outrage over which Elsmere had ground his teeth in fierce
and helpless anger. Catherine had found her a shelter, and was to see
her through her 'trouble'; the girl, a frail half-witted creature, who
could find no words even to bewail herself, clinging to her the while
with the dumbest, pitifulest tenacity.

How _could_ she leave that girl? It was as if all the fibres of life
were being violently wrenched from all their natural connections.

'Robert!' she cried at last with a start. 'Had you forgotten the
Institute to-morrow?'

'No--no,' he said with the saddest smile. 'No, I had not forgotten it.
Don't go, Catherine--don't go. I must. But why should you go through
it?'

'But there are all those flags and wreaths,' she said, getting up in
pained bewilderment. 'I must go and look after them.'

He caught her in his arms.

'Oh, my wife, my wife, forgive me!' It was a groan of misery. She put up
her hands and pressed his hair back from his temples.

'I love you, Robert,' she said simply, her face colourless, but
perfectly calm.

Half an hour later, after he had worked through some letters, he went
into the workroom and found her surrounded with flags, and a vast litter
of paper roses and evergreens, which she and the new agent's daughters
who had come up to help her were putting together for the decorations of
the morrow. Mary was tottering from chair to chair in high glee, a big
pink rose stuck in the belt of her pinafore. His pale wife, trying to
smile and talk as usual, her lap full of evergreens, and her politeness
exercised by the chatter of the two Miss Batesons, seemed to Robert one
of the most pitiful spectacles he had ever seen. He fled from it out
into the village driven by a restless longing for change and movement.

Here he found a large gathering round the new Institute. There were
carpenters at work on a triumphal arch in front, and close by, an
admiring circle of children and old men, h