rock of personal love and duty?

Oh! let him go back to her!--wrestle with her, open his heart again, try
new ways, make new concessions. How faint the sense of _her_ trial has
been growing within him of late! hers which had once been more terrible
to him than his own! He feels the special temptations of his own nature;
he throws himself, humbled, convicted, at her feet. The woman, the scene
he has left, is effaced, blotted out by the natural intense reaction of
remorseful love.

* * * * *

So he sped homewards at last through the noise of Oxford Street, seeing,
hearing nothing. He opened his own door, and let himself into the dim,
silent house. How the moment recalled to him that other supreme moment
of his life at Murewell! No light in the drawing-room. He went upstairs
and softly turned the handle of her room.

Inside the room seemed to him nearly dark. But the window was wide open.
The free loosely-growing branches of the plane trees made a dark,
delicate network against the luminous blue of the night. A cool air came
to him laden with an almost rural scent of earth and leaves. By the
window sat a white motionless figure. As he closed the door it rose and
walked towards him without a word. Instinctively Robert felt that
something unknown to him had been passing here. He paused breathless,
expectant.

She came to him. She linked her cold trembling fingers round his neck.

'Robert, I have been waiting so long--it was so late! I thought'--and
she choked down a sob--'perhaps something has happened to him, we are
separated for ever, and I shall never be able to tell him. Robert, Mr.
Flaxman talked to me; he opened my eyes; I have been so cruel to you, so
hard! I have broken my vow. I don't deserve it; but--_Robert!_----'

She had spoken with extraordinary self-command till the last word, which
fell into a smothered cry for pardon. Catherine Elsmere had very little
of the soft clingingness which makes the charm of a certain type of
woman. Each phrase she had spoken had seemed to take with it a piece of
her life. She trembled and tottered in her husband's arms.

He bent over her with half-articulate words of amazement, of passion. He
led her to her chair, and, kneeling before her, he tried, so far as the
emotion of both would let him, to make her realise what was in his _own_
heart, the penitence and longing which had winged his return to her.
Without a mention of Madame de Netteville