, 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 splendours 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 candlelight.

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 towards her, his look full of feeling.

'Catherine! can't you let me--will you never let me te