beginning until now!'

The squire make a quick impatient movement. Mr. Wynnstay looked
significantly at his wife, who dropped her eyeglass with a little
irrepressible smile.

As for Robert, leaning forward with hastened breath, it seemed to him
that his eyes and the squire's crossed like swords. In Robert's mind
there had arisen a sudden passion of antagonism. Before his eyes there
was a vision of a child in a stifling room, struggling with mortal
disease, imposed upon her, as he hotly reminded himself, by this man's
culpable neglect. The dinner-party, the splendour of the room, the
conversation, excited a kind of disgust in him. If it were not for
Catherine's pale face opposite, he could hardly have maintained his
self-control.

Mrs. Darcy, a little bewildered, and feeling that things were not going
particularly well, thought it best to interfere.

'Roger,' she said plaintively, 'you must not be so philosophical. It's
too hot! He used to talk like that,' she went on, bending over to Mr.
Wynnstay, 'to the French priests who came to see us last winter in
Paris. They never minded a bit--they used to laugh. "Monsieur votre
frere, madame, c'est un homme qui a trop lu," they would say to me when
I gave them their coffee. Oh, they were such dears, those old priests!
Roger said they had great hopes of me.'

The chatter was welcome, the conversation broke up. The squire turned to
Lady Charlotte, and Rose to Langham.

'Why didn't you support Robert?' she said to him, impulsively, with a
dissatisfied face. 'He was alone, against the table!'

'What good should I have done him?' he asked, with a shrug. 'And pray,
my lady confessor, what enthusiasms do you suspect me of?'

He looked at her intently. It seemed to her they were by the gate
again--the touch of his lips on her hand. She turned from him hastily to
stoop for her fan which had slipped away. It was only Catherine who, for
her annoyance, saw the scarlet flush leap into the fair face. An instant
later Mrs. Darcy had given the signal.

CHAPTER XVIII

After dinner Lady Charlotte fixed herself at first on Catherine, whose
quiet dignity during the somewhat trying ordeal of the dinner had
impressed her, but a few minutes' talk produced in her the conviction
that without a good deal of pains--and why should a Londoner, accustomed
to the cream of things, take pains with a country clergyman's wife?--she
was not likely to get much out of her. Her appearance promise