nd cloak came
towards them. The squire put up his eyeglass.

'Humph!' he remarked; 'do you know this merryandrew, Elsmere?'

It was Newcome. As they passed, Robert with slightly heightened colour
gave him an affectionate nod and smile. Newcome's quick eye ran over the
companions, he responded stiffly, and his step grew more rapid. A week
or two later Robert noticed with a little prick of remorse that he had
seen nothing of Newcome for an age. If Newcome would not come to him, he
must go to Mottringham. He planned an expedition, but something happened
to prevent it.

And Catherine? Naturally this new and most unexpected relation of
Robert's to the man who had begun by insulting him was of considerable
importance to the wife. In the first place it broke up to some extent
the exquisite _tete-a-tete_ of their home life; it encroached often upon
time that had always been hers; it filled Robert's mind more and more
with matters in which she had no concern. All these things many wives
might have resented. Catherine Elsmere resented none of them. It is
probable, of course, that she had her natural moments of regret and
comparison, when love said to itself a little sorely and hungrily, 'It
is hard to be even a fraction less to him than I once was!' But if so,
these moments never betrayed themselves in word or act. Her tender
common sense, her sweet humility, made her recognise at once Robert's
need of intellectual comradeship, isolated as he was in this remote
rural district. She knew perfectly that a clergyman's life of perpetual
giving forth becomes morbid and unhealthy if there is not some
corresponding taking in.

If only it had not been Mr. Wendover! She marvelled over the fascination
Robert found in his dry cynical talk. She wondered that a Christian
pastor could ever forget Mr. Wendover's antecedents; that the man who
had nursed those sick children could forgive Mile End. All in all as
they were to each other, she felt for the first time that she often
understood her husband imperfectly. His mobility, his eagerness, were
sometimes now a perplexity, even a pain to her.

It must not be imagined, however, that Robert let himself drift into
this intellectual intimacy with one of the most distinguished of
anti-Christian thinkers without reflecting on its possible consequences.
The memory of that night of misery which _The Idols of the Market-place_
had inflicted on him was enough. He was no match in controversy for Mr.
W