to yourself and other people as may
be; do your duty if you like it, but, for heaven's sake, don't cant
about it to other people!'

If the affinities of character count for much, Catherine and Henry Grey
should certainly have understood each other. The tutor liked the look of
Elsmere's wife. His kindly brown eyes rested on her with pleasure; he
tried in his shy but friendly way to get at her, and there was in both
of them a touch of homeliness, a sheer power of unworldliness that
should have drawn them together. And indeed Catherine felt the charm,
the spell of this born leader of men. But she watched him with a sort
of troubled admiration, puzzled, evidently, by the halo of moral dignity
surrounding him, which contended with something else in her mind
respecting him. Some words of Robert's, uttered very early in their
acquaintance, had set her on her guard. Speaking of religion, Robert had
said, 'Grey is not one of us'; and Catherine, restrained by a hundred
ties of training and temperament, would not surrender herself, and could
not if she would.

Then had followed their home-coming to the rectory, and that first
institution of their common life, never to be forgotten for the
tenderness and the sacredness of it. Mrs. Elsmere had received them, and
had then retired to a little cottage of her own close by. She had of
course already made the acquaintance of her daughter-in-law, for she had
been the Thornburghs' guest for ten days before the marriage in
September, and Catherine, moreover, had paid her a short visit earlier
in the summer. But it was now that for the first time she realised to
the full the character of the woman Robert had married. Catherine's
manner to her was sweetness itself. Parted from her own mother as she
was, the younger woman's strong filial instincts spent themselves in
tending the mother who had been the guardian and life of Robert's youth.
And Mrs. Elsmere in return was awed by Catherine's moral force and
purity of nature, and proud of her personal beauty, which was so real,
in spite of the severity of the type, and to which marriage had given,
at any rate for the moment, a certain added softness and brilliancy.

But there were difficulties in the way. Catherine was a little too apt
to treat Mrs. Elsmere as she would have treated her own mother. But to
be nursed and protected, to be screened from draughts, and run after
with shawls and stools was something wholly new and intolerable to Mrs.