e's life was written, not in her
literary studies or her social triumphs, but in various recurrent
outbreaks of unbridled impulse--the secret, and in one or two cases the
shameful landmarks of her past. And, as persons of experience, they
could also have warned you that the cold intriguer, always mistress of
herself, only exists in fiction, and that a certain poisoned and fevered
interest in the religious leader, the young and pious priest, as such,
is common enough among the corrupter women of all societies.

Towards the end of May she asked Elsmere to dine '_en petit comite_, a
gentlemen's dinner--except for my cousin, Lady Aubrey Willert'--to meet
an eminent Liberal Catholic, a friend of Montalembert's youth.

It was a week or two after the failure of the Wardlaw experiment. Do
what each would, the sore silence between the husband and wife was
growing, was swallowing up more of life.

'Shall I go, Catherine?' he asked, handing her the note.

'It would interest you,' she said gently, giving it back to him
scrupulously, as though she had nothing to do with it.

He knelt down before her, and put his arms round her, looking at her
with eyes which had a dumb and yet fiery appeal written in them. His
heart was hungry for that old clinging dependence, that willing weakness
of love, her youth had yielded him so gladly, instead of this silent
strength of antagonism. The memory of her Murewell self flashed
miserably through him as he knelt there, of her delicate penitence
towards him after her first sight of Newcome, of their night walks
during the Mile End epidemic. Did he hold now in his arms only the ghost
and shadow of that Murewell Catherine?

She must have read the reproach, the yearning of his look, for she gave
a little shiver, as though bracing herself with a kind of agony to
resist.

'Let me go, Robert!' she said gently, kissing him on the forehead and
drawing back. 'I hear Mary calling, and nurse is out.'

The days went on and the date of Madame de Netteville's dinner-party had
come round. About seven o'clock that evening Catherine sat with the
child in the drawing-room, expecting Robert. He had gone off early in
the afternoon to the East End with Hugh Flaxman to take part in a
committee of workmen organised for the establishment of a choral union
in R----, the scheme of which had been Flaxman's chief contribution so
far to the Elgood Street undertaking.

It seemed to her as she sat there working, the wind