propriating and clinging to every word, till the nervous
clasp of the long delicate fingers relaxed, her head dropped a little,
gently, against the head of the child, and tired with much feeling she
slept.

Robert slipped away and strolled out into the garden in the
fast-gathering darkness. His mind was full of that intense spiritual
life of Catherine's which in its wonderful self-containedness and
strength was always a marvel, sometimes a reproach, to him. Beside her,
he seemed to himself a light creature, drawn hither and thither by this
interest and by that, tangled in the fleeting shows of things--the toy
and plaything of circumstance. He thought ruefully and humbly, as he
wandered on through the dusk, of his own lack of inwardness: 'Everything
divides me from Thee!' he could have cried in St. Augustine's manner.
'Books, and friends, and work--all seem to hide Thee from me. Why am I
so passionate for this and that, for all these sections and fragments of
Thee? Oh, for the One, the All! Fix there thy resting-place, my soul!'

And presently, after this cry of self-reproach, he turned to muse on
that intuition of the world's pain which had been troubling Catherine,
shrinking from it even more than she had shrunk from it, in proportion
as his nature was more imaginative than hers. And Christ the only clue,
the only remedy--no other anywhere in this vast universe, where all men
are under sentence of death, where the whole creation groaneth and
travaileth in pain together until now!

And yet what countless generations of men had borne their pain, knowing
nothing of the one Healer. He thought of Buddhist patience and Buddhist
charity; of the long centuries during which Chaldean or Persian or
Egyptian lived, suffered, and died, trusting the gods they knew. And how
many other generations, nominally children of the Great Hope, had used
it as the mere instrument of passion or of hate, cursing in the name of
love, destroying in the name of pity! For how much of the world's pain
was not Christianity itself responsible? His thoughts recurred with a
kind of anguished perplexity to some of the problems stirred in him of
late by his historical reading. The strifes and feuds and violences of
the early Church returned to weigh upon him--the hair-splitting
superstition, the selfish passion for power. He recalled Gibbon's
lamentation over the age of the Antonines, and Mommsen's grave doubt
whether, taken as a whole, the area once cove