erine in her dimly lighted room, where the stormy
north-west wind beat noisily against her window, was sitting in a low
chair, her head leaning against her bed, her little well-worn Testament
open on her knee. But she was not reading. Her eyes were shut; one hand
hung down beside her, and tears were raining fast and silently over her
cheeks. It was the stillest, most restrained weeping. She hardly knew
why she wept, she only knew that there was something within her which
must have its way. What did this inner smart and tumult mean, this
rebellion of the self against the will which had never yet found its
mastery fail it? It was as though from her childhood till now she had
lived in a moral world whereof the aims, the dangers, the joys, were all
she knew; and now the walls of this world were crumbling round her, and
strange lights, strange voices, strange colours were breaking through.
All the sayings of Christ which had lain closest to her heart for
years, to-night for the first time seem to her no longer sayings of
comfort or command, but sayings of fire and flame that burn their
coercing way through life and thought. We recite so glibly, 'He that
loseth his life shall save it;' and when we come to any of the common
crises of experience which are the source and the sanction of the words,
flesh and blood recoil. This girl amid her mountains had carried
religion as far as religion can be carried before it meets life in the
wrestle appointed it. The calm, simple outlines of things are blurring
before her eyes; the great placid deeps of the soul are breaking up.

To the purest ascetic temper a struggle of this kind is hardly real.
Catherine felt a bitter surprise at her own pain. Yesterday a sort of
mystical exaltation upheld her. What had broken it down?

Simply a pair of reproachful eyes, a pale protesting face. What trifles
compared to the awful necessities of an infinite obedience! And yet they
haunt her, till her heart aches for misery, till she only yearns to be
counselled, to be forgiven, to be at least understood.

'Why, why am I so weak?' she cried in utter abasement of soul, and knew
not that in that weakness, or rather in the founts of character from
which it sprang, lay the innermost safeguard of her life.

CHAPTER IX

Robert was very nearly reduced to despair by the scene with Catherine we
have described. He spent a brooding and miserable hour in the vicar's
study afterwards, making up his mind as