'Yes,' said Catherine, sighing, and then paused. 'Robert,' she burst out
again, 'I am certain that man made love of a kind to Rose. _He_ will
never think of it again, but since the night before last she, to my
mind, is simply a changed creature.'

'_I_ don't see it,' said Robert doubtfully.

Catherine looked at him with a little angel scorn in her gray eyes. That
men should make their seeing in such matters the measure of the visible!

'You have been studying the squire, sir--I have been studying Rose.'

Then she poured out her heart to him, describing the little signs of
change and suffering her anxious sense had noted, in spite of Rose's
proud effort to keep all the world, but especially Catherine, at arm's
length. And at the end her feeling swept her into a denunciation of
Langham, which was to Robert like a breath from the past, from those
stern hills wherein he met her first. The happiness of their married
life had so softened or masked all her ruggedness of character, that
there was a certain joy in seeing those strong forces in her which had
struck him first reappear.

'Of course I feel myself to blame,' he said when she stopped. 'But how
could one foresee, with such an inveterate hermit and recluse? And I
owed him--I owe him--so much.'

'I know,' said Catherine, but frowning still. It probably seemed to her
that that old debt had been more than effaced.

'You will have to send her to Berlin,' said Elsmere after a pause. 'You
must play off her music against this unlucky feeling. If it exists it is
your only chance.'

'Yes, she must go to Berlin,' said Catherine slowly.

Then presently she looked up, a flash of exquisite feeling breaking up
the delicate resolution of the face.

'I am not sad about that, Robert. Oh, how you have widened my world for
me!'

Suddenly that hour in Marrisdale came back to her. They were in the
woodpath. She crept inside her husband's arm and put up her face to him,
swept away by an overmastering impulse of self-humiliating love.

The next day Robert walked over to the little market town of Churton,
saw the discreet and long-established solicitor of the place, and got
from him a complete account of the present state of the rural sanitary
law. The first step clearly was to move the sanitary inspector; if that
failed for any reason, then any _bona fide_ inhabitant had an appeal to
the local sanitary authority, viz. the board of guardians. Robert walked
home pondering his inf