e. You are going abroad
in the summer, you say. Let me come to you in the autumn.'

The squire said nothing, and went his way, leaning heavily on his stick,
across the square. Robert felt himself a brute to let him go, and almost
ran after him.

That evening Robert was disquieted by the receipt of a note from a young
fellow of St. Anselm's, an intimate friend and occasional secretary of
Grey. Grey, the writer said, had received Robert's last letter, was
deeply interested in his account of his work, and begged him to write
again. He would have written, but that he was himself in the doctor's
hands, suffering from various ills, probably connected with an attack of
malarial fever which had befallen him in Rome the year before.

Catherine found him poring over the letter, and, as it seemed to her,
oppressed by an anxiety out of all proportion to the news itself.

'They are not really troubled, I think,' she said, kneeling down beside
him, and laying her cheek against his. 'He will soon get over it,
Robert.'

But, alas! this mood, the tender characteristic mood of the old
Catherine, was becoming rarer and rarer with her. As the spring
expanded, as the sun and the leaves came back, poor Catherine's temper
had only grown more wintry and more rigid. Her life was full of moments
of acute suffering. Never, for instance, did she forget the evening of
Robert's lecture to the club. All the time he was away she had sat
brooding by herself in the drawing-room, divining with a bitter
clairvoyance all that scene in which he was taking part, her being
shaken with a tempest of misery and repulsion. And together with that
torturing image of a glaring room in which her husband, once Christ's
loyal minister, was employing all his powers of mind and speech to make
it easier for ignorant men to desert and fight against the Lord who
bought them, there mingled a hundred memories of her father which were
now her constant companions. In proportion as Robert and she became
more divided, her dead father resumed a ghostly hold upon her. There
were days when she went about rigid and silent, in reality living
altogether in the past, among the gray farms, the crags, and the stony
ways of the mountains.

At such times her mind would be full of pictures of her father's
ministrations--his talks with the shepherds on the hills, with the women
at their doors, his pale dreamer's face beside some wild deathbed,
shining with the Divine message, the 'visi