hours passed
on, it dropped on to his knee, and he sat thinking--endlessly thinking.
The young labourer lay motionless beside him, the lines of the long
emaciated frame showing through the bed-clothes. The night-light
flickered on the broken discoloured ceiling; every now and then a mouse
scratched in the plaster; the mother's heavy breathing came from the
next room; sometimes a dog barked or an owl cried outside. Otherwise
deep silence, such silence as drives the soul back upon itself.

Elsmere was conscious of a strange sense of moral expansion. The stern
judgments, the passionate condemnations which his nature housed so
painfully, seemed lifted from it. The soul breathed an 'ampler aether, a
diviner air.' Oh! the mysteries of life and character, the subtle
inexhaustible claims of pity! The problems which hang upon our being
here; its mixture of elements; the pressure of its inexorable physical
environment; the relations of mind to body, of man's poor will to this
tangled tyrannous life--it was along these old, old lines his thought
went painfully groping; and always at intervals it came back to the
squire, pondering, seeking to understand, a new soberness, a new
humility and patience entering in.

And yet it was not Meyrick's facts exactly that had brought this about.
Robert thought them imperfect, only half true. Rather was it the spirit
of love, of infinite forbearance in which the simpler, duller nature had
declared itself that had appealed to him, nay, reproached him.

Then these thoughts led him on farther and farther from man to God, from
human defect to the Eternal Perfectness. Never once during those hours
did Elsmere's hand fail to perform its needed service to the faint
sleeper beside him, and yet that night was one long dream and
strangeness to him, nothing real anywhere but consciousness, and God its
source; the soul attacked every now and then by phantom stabs of doubt,
of bitter brief misgiving, as the barriers of sense between it and the
eternal enigma grew more and more transparent, wrestling awhile, and
then prevailing. And each golden moment of certainty, of conquering
faith, seemed to Robert in some sort a gift from Catherine's hand. It
was she who led him through the shades; it was her voice murmuring in
his ear.

When the first gray dawn began to creep in slowly perceptible waves into
the room, Elsmere felt as though not hours but years of experience lay
between him and the beginnings of his