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
battle-ground 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 new-born 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 b