cate beauty as he had never been before.

She hardly spoke all through, but he felt that she listened without
resistance, nay, at last that she listened with a kind of hunger. He
went from story to story, from scene to scene, without any excitement,
in his most ordinary manner, making his reserves now and then,
expressing his own opinion when it occurred to him, and not always
favourably. But gradually the whole picture emerged, began to live
before them. At last he hurriedly looked at his watch.

'What a time I have kept you! It has been a relief to talk to you.'

'You have not had dinner!' she said, looking up at him with a sudden
nervous bewilderment which touched him and subtly changed his impression
of her.

'No matter. I will get some at home. Good-night!'

When he was gone she carried the child up to bed; her supper was brought
to her solitary in the dining-room; and afterwards in the drawing-room,
where a soft twilight was fading into a soft and starlit night, she
mechanically brought out some work for Mary, and sat bending over it by
the window. After about an hour she looked up straight before her,
threw her work down, and slipped on to the floor, her head resting on
the chair.

The shock, the storm, had come. There for hours lay Catherine Elsmere
weeping her heart away, wrestling with herself, with memory, with God.
It was the greatest moral upheaval she had ever known--greater even than
that which had convulsed her life at Murewell.

CHAPTER XLIII

Robert, tired and sick at heart, felt himself in no mood this evening
for a dinner-party in which conversation would be treated more or less
as a fine art. Liberal Catholicism had lost its charm; his sympathetic
interest in Montalembert, Lacordaire, Lamennais, had to be quickened,
pumped up again as it were, by great efforts, which were constantly
relaxed within him as he sped westwards by the recurrent memory of that
miserable room, the group of men, the bleeding hand, the white dying
face.

In Madame de Netteville's drawing-room he found a small number of people
assembled. M. de Querouelle, a middle-sized, round-headed old gentleman
of a familiar French type; Lady Aubrey, thinner, more lath-like than
ever, clad in some sumptuous mingling of dark red and silver; Lord
Rupert, beaming under the recent introduction of a Land Purchase Bill
for Ireland, by which he saw his way at last to wash his hands of 'a
beastly set of tenants'; Mr. Wharncliffe,