been hoarse like
that?'

'More or less for the last month. He is very much worried by it himself,
and talks of clergyman's throat. He had a touch of it, it appears, once
in the country.'

'Clergyman's throat?' Edmondson shook his head dubiously. 'It may be. I
wish he would let me overhaul him.'

'I wish he would!' said Flaxman devoutly. 'I will see what I can do. I
will get hold of Mrs. Elsmere.'

Meanwhile Robert and Catherine had driven home together. As they entered
the study she caught his hands, a suppressed and exquisite passion
gleaming in her face.

'You did not explain Him! You never will!'

He stood, held by her, his gaze meeting hers. Then in an instant his
face changed, blanched before her--he seemed to gasp for breath--she was
only just able to save him from falling. It was apparently another swoon
of exhaustion. As she knelt beside him on the floor, having done for him
all she could, watching his return to consciousness, Catherine's look
would have terrified any of those who loved her. There are some natures
which are never blind, never taken blissfully unawares, and which taste
calamity and grief to the very dregs.

'Robert, to-morrow you _will_ see a doctor?' she implored him when at
last he was safely in bed--white, but smiling.

He nodded.

'Send for Edmondson. What I mind most is this hoarseness,' he said, in a
voice that was little more than a tremulous whisper.

Catherine hardly closed her eyes all night. The room, the house, seemed
to her stifling, oppressive, like a grave. And, by ill luck, with the
morning came a long expected letter, not indeed from the squire, but
about the squire. Robert had been for some time expecting a summons to
Murewell. The squire had written to him last in October from Clarens, on
the Lake of Geneva. Since then weeks had passed without bringing Elsmere
any news of him at all. Meanwhile the growth of the New Brotherhood had
absorbed its founder, so that the inquiries which should have been sent
to Murewell had been postponed. The letter which reached him now was
from old Meyrick. 'The squire has had another bad attack, and is _much_
weaker. But his mind is clear again, and he greatly desires to see you.
If you can, come to-morrow.'

'_His mind is clear again!_' Horrified by the words and by the images
they called up, remorseful also for his own long silence, Robert sprang
up from bed, where the letter had been brought to him, and presently
appeared downst