en still making strides.

'Do you imagine I don't appreciate Robert because I make bad jokes
about the choir and the clothing club?' she asked him, with a little
quick repentance passing like a shadow through her eyes. 'I always feel
I play an odious part here. I can't like it--I can't--their life. I
should hate it! And yet----'

She sighed remorsefully, and Langham, who five minutes before could have
wished her to be always smiling, could now have almost asked to fix her
as she was: the eyes veiled, the soft lips relaxed in this passing
instant of gravity.

'Ah! I forgot--' and she looked up again with light bewitching
appeal--'there is still that question, my poor little question of Sunday
night, when I was in that fine moral frame of mind and you were near
giving me, I believe, the only good advice you ever gave in your
life,--how shamefully you have treated it!'

One brilliant look, which Catherine for her torment caught from the
other side of the table, and then in an instant the quick face changed
and stiffened. Mr. Wynnstay was speaking to her, and Langham was left to
the intermittent mercies of Dr. Meyrick, who though glad to talk, was
also quite content, apparently, to judge from the radiant placidity of
his look, to examine his wine, study his _menu_, and enjoy his
_entrees_ in silence, undisturbed by the uncertain pleasures of
conversation.

Robert, meanwhile, during the first few minutes, in which Mr. Wynnstay
had been engaged in some family talk with Mrs. Darcy, had been allowing
himself a little deliberate study of Mr. Wendover across what seemed the
safe distance of a long table. The squire was talking shortly and
abruptly, yet with occasional flashes of shrill ungainly laughter, to
Lady Charlotte, who seemed to have no sort of fear of him and to find
him good company, and every now and then Robert saw him turn to
Catherine on the other side of him, and with an obvious change of manner
address some formal and constrained remark to her.

Mr. Wendover was a man of middle height and loose bony frame, of which,
as Robert had noticed in the drawing-room, all the lower half had a thin
and shrunken look. But the shoulders, which had the scholar's stoop, and
the head were massive and squarely outlined. The head was specially
remarkable for its great breadth and comparative flatness above the
eyes, and for the way in which the head itself dwarfed the face, which,
as contrasted with the large angularity of t