e bare Elgood Street room, the dingy outlook on the
high walls of a warehouse opposite, the lines of blanched quick-eyed
artisans, the dissent from what she loved, and he had once loved,
implied in everything, the lecture itself, on the narratives of the
Passion; it was all exquisitely painful to her, and, yet, yet she was
glad to be there.

Afterwards Wardlaw, with the brusque remark to Elsmere that 'any fool
could see he was getting done up,' insisted on taking the children's
class. Catherine, too, had been impressed, as she saw Robert raised a
little above her in the glare of many windows, with the sudden
perception that the worn, exhausted look of the preceding summer had
returned upon him. She held out her hand to Wardlaw with a quick, warm
word of thanks. He glanced at her curiously. What had brought her there
after all?

Then Robert, protesting that he was being ridiculously coddled, and that
Wardlaw was much more in want of a holiday than he, was carried off to
the Embankment, and the two spent a happy hour wandering westward,
Somerset House, the bridges, the Westminster towers rising before them
into the haze of the June afternoon. A little fresh breeze came off the
river; that, or his wife's hand on his arm, seemed to put new life into
Elsmere. And she walked beside him, talking frankly, heart to heart,
with flashes of her old sweet gaiety, as she had not talked for months.

Deep in her mystical sense all the time lay the belief in a final
restoration, in an all-atoning moment, perhaps at the very end of life,
in which the blind would see, the doubter be convinced. And, meanwhile,
the blessedness of this peace, this surrender! Surely the air this
afternoon was pure and life-giving for them, the bells rang for them,
the trees were green for them!

* * * * *

He had need in the week that followed of all that she had given back to
him. For Mr. Grey's illness had taken a dangerous and alarming turn. It
seemed to be the issue of long ill-health, and the doctors feared that
there were no resources of constitution left to carry him through it.
Every day some old St. Anselm's friend on the spot wrote to Elsmere, and
with each post the news grew more despairing. Since Elsmere had left
Oxford he could count on the fingers of one hand the occasions on which
he and Grey had met face to face. But for him, as for many another man
of our time, Henry Grey's influence was not primarily an in