ed throughout it ignorant of
the true problems at issue. As it was, the keen instrument he had
sharpened so laboriously on indifferent material now ploughed its
agonising way, bit by bit, into the most intimate recesses of thought
and faith.

Much of the actual struggle he was able to keep from Catherine's view,
as he had vowed to himself to keep it. For after the squire's departure
Mrs. Darcy too went joyously up to London to flutter a while through the
golden alleys of Mayfair; and Elsmere was left once more in undisturbed
possession of the Murewell library. There for a while on every day--oh,
pitiful relief!--he could hide himself from the eyes he loved.

But, after all, married love allows of nothing but the shallowest
concealments. Catherine had already had one or two alarms. Once, in
Robert's study, among a tumbled mass of books he had pulled out in
search of something missing, and which she was putting in order, she had
come across that very book on the Prophecies which at a critical moment
had so deeply affected Elsmere. It lay open, and Catherine was caught by
the heading of a section: 'The Messianic Idea.'

She began to read, mechanically at first, and read about a page. That
page so shocked a mind accustomed to a purely traditional and mystical
interpretation of the Bible that the book dropped abruptly from her
hand, and she stood a moment by her husband's table, her fine face pale
and frowning.

She noticed, with bitterness, Mr. Wendover's name on the title-page. Was
it right for Robert to have such books? Was it wise, was it prudent, for
the Christian to measure himself against such antagonism as this? She
wrestled painfully with the question. 'Oh, but I can't understand,' she
said to herself with an almost agonised energy. 'It is I who am timid,
faithless! He _must_--he _must_--know what they say; he must have gone
through the dark places if he is to carry others through them.'

So she stilled and trampled on the inward protest. She yearned to speak
of it to Robert, but something withheld her. In her passionate wifely
trust she could not bear to seem to question the use he made of his time
and thought; and a delicate moral scruple warned her she might easily
allow her dislike of the Wendover friendship to lead her into
exaggeration and injustice.

But the stab of that moment recurred--dealt now by one slight incident,
now by another. And after the squire's departure Catherine suddenly
realised that