owed himself to hope, he found it a doubly
hard task to submit.'

Ah, that depression! It was the last eclipse through which a radiant
soul was called to pass; but while it lasted it was black indeed. The
implacable reality, obscured at first by the emotion and excitement of
farewells, and then by a brief spring of hope and returning vigour,
showed itself now in all its stern nakedness--sat down, as it were, eye
to eye with Elsmere--immovable, ineluctable. There were certain features
of the disease itself which were specially trying to such a nature. The
long silences it enforced were so unlike him, seemed already to withdraw
him so pitifully from their yearning grasp! In these dark days he would
sit crouching over the wood fire in the little _salon_, or lie drawn to
the window looking out on the rainstorms bowing the ilexes or scattering
the meshes of clematis, silent, almost always gentle, but turning
sometimes on Catherine, or on Mary playing at his feet, eyes which, as
Edmondson said, 'wrung the heart.'

But in reality, under the husband's depression, and under the wife's
inexhaustible devotion, a combat was going on, which reached no third
person, but was throughout poignant and tragic to the highest degree.
Catherine was making her last effort, Robert his last stand. As we
know, ever since that passionate submission of the wife which had thrown
her morally at her husband's feet, there had lingered at the bottom of
her heart one last supreme hope. All persons of the older Christian type
attribute a special importance to the moment of death. While the man of
science looks forward to his last hour as a moment of certain
intellectual weakness, and calmly warns his friends beforehand that he
is to be judged by the utterances of health and not by those of physical
collapse, the Christian believes that on the confines of eternity the
veil of flesh shrouding the soul grows thin and transparent, and that
the glories and the truths of Heaven are visible with a special
clearness and authority to the dying. It was for this moment, either in
herself or in him, that Catherine's unconquerable faith had been
patiently and dumbly waiting. Either she would go first, and death would
wing her poor last words to him with a magic and power not their own;
or, when he came to leave her, the veil of doubt would fall away
perforce from a spirit as pure as it was humble, and the eternal light,
the light of the Crucified, shine through.