ll
of pictures, and when we joined again we did not speak of it. Did he see
us, I wonder, and purposely avoid us? Something made me think so.

'Oh, I wish I could believe she had forgotten him! I am certain she
would laugh me to angry scorn if I mentioned him; but there she sits by
the fire now, while I am writing, quite drooping and pale, because she
thinks I am not noticing. If she did but love me a little more! It must
be my fault, I know.

'Yes, as you say, Burwood may as well be shut up or let. My dear, dear
father!'

Robert could imagine the sigh with which Catherine had laid down her
pen. Dear tender soul, with all its old-world fidelities and pieties
pure and unimpaired! He raised the signature to his lips.

Next day Catherine came back to him. Robert had no words too opprobrious
for the widowed condition from which her return had rescued him. It
seemed to Catherine, however, that life had been very full and keen with
him since her departure! He lingered with her after supper, vowing that
his club boys might make what hay in the study they pleased; he was
going to tell her the news, whatever happened.

'I told you of my two dinners at the Hall? The first was just
_tete-a-tete_ with the squire--oh, and Mrs. Darcy, of course. I am
always forgetting her, poor little thing, which is most ungrateful of
me. A pathetic life that, Catherine. She seems to me, in her odd way,
perpetually hungering for affection, for praise. No doubt, if she got
them, she wouldn't know what to do with them. She would just touch and
leave them as she does everything. Her talk and she are both as light
and wandering as thistledown. But still, meanwhile, she hungers, and is
never satisfied. There seems to be something peculiarly antipathetic in
her to the squire. I can't make it out. He is sometimes quite brutal to
her when she is more inconsequent than usual. I often wonder she goes on
living with him.'

Catherine made some indignant comment.

'Yes,' said Robert, musing. 'Yes, it is bad.'

But Catherine thought his tone might have been more unqualified, and
marvelled again at the curious lenity of judgment he had always shown of
late towards Mr. Wendover. And all his judgments of himself and others
were generally so quick, so uncompromising!

'On the second occasion we had Freake and Dashwood,' naming two
well-known English antiquarians. 'Very learned, very jealous, and very
snuffy; altogether "too genuine," as poor mother used to