ommon experiences of life. Both of them were
really simple, brought up in old-fashioned simple ways, easily touched,
responsive to all that high spiritual education which flows from the
familiar incidents of the human story, approached poetically and
passionately. As the young husband sat in the quiet of his wife's room,
the occasional restless movements of the small brown head against her
breast causing the only sound perceptible in the country silence, he
felt all the deep familiar currents of human feeling sweeping through
him--love, reverence, thanksgiving--and all the walls of the soul, as it
were, expanding and enlarging as they passed.

Responsive creature that he was, the experience of these days was hardly
happiness. It went too deep; it brought him too poignantly near to all
that is most real and therefore most tragic in life.

Catherine's recovery also was slower than might have been expected,
considering her constitutional soundness, and for the first week, after
that faint moment of joy when her child was laid upon her arm, and she
saw her husband's quivering face above her, there was a kind of
depression hovering over her. Robert felt it, and felt too that all his
devotion could not soothe it away. At last she said to him one evening,
in the encroaching September twilight, speaking with a sudden hurrying
vehemence, wholly unlike herself, as though a barrier of reserve had
given way,--

'Robert I cannot put it out of my head. I cannot forget it, _the pain of
the world_!'

He shut the book he was reading, her hand in his, and bent over her with
questioning eyes.

'It seems,' she went on, with that difficulty which a strong nature
always feels in self-revelation, 'to take the joy even out of our
love--and the child. I feel ashamed almost that mere physical pain
should have laid such hold on me--and yet I can't get away from it. It's
not for myself,' and she smiled faintly at him. 'Comparatively I had so
little to bear! But I know now for the first time what physical pain may
mean--and I never knew before! I lie thinking, Robert, about all
creatures in pain--workmen crushed by machinery, or soldiers--or poor
things in hospitals--above all of women! Oh, when I get well, how I will
take care of the women here! What women must suffer even here in
out-of-the-way cottages--no doctor, no kind nursing, all blind agony and
struggle! And women in London in dens like those Mr. Newcome got into,
degraded, forsaken,