s going on,
are you and I to remain strangers to one another in 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 moonlit 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 step 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 invincible resolution,