the whole atmosphere of their home-life was changed.

Robert was giving himself to his people with a more scrupulous energy
than ever. Never had she seen him so pitiful, so full of heart for every
human creature. His sermons, with their constant imaginative dwelling on
the earthly life of Jesus, affected her now with a poignancy, a pathos,
which were almost unbearable. And his tenderness to _her_ was beyond
words. But with that tenderness there was constantly mixed a note of
remorse, a painful self-depreciation which she could hardly notice in
speech, but which every now and then wrung her heart. And in his parish
work he often showed a depression, an irritability, entirely new to her.
He who had always the happiest power of forgetting to-morrow all the
rubs of to-day, seemed now quite incapable of saving himself and his
cheerfulness in the old ways, nay, had developed a capacity for sheer
worry she had never seen in him before. And meanwhile all the old
gossips of the place spoke their mind freely to Catherine on the subject
of the rector's looks, coupling their remarks with a variety of
prescriptions, out of which Robert did sometimes manage to get one of
his old laughs. His sleeplessness, too, which had always been a
constitutional tendency, had become now so constant and wearing that
Catherine began to feel a nervous hatred of his book-work, and of those
long mornings at the Hall; a passionate wish to put an end to it, and
carry him away for a holiday.

But he would not hear of the holiday, and he could hardly bear any talk
of himself. And Catherine had been brought up in a school of feeling
which bade love be very scrupulous, very delicate, and which recognised
in the strongest way the right of every human soul to its own privacy,
its own reserves. That something definite troubled him she was certain.
What it was he clearly avoided telling her, and she could not hurt him
by impatience.

He would tell her soon--when it was right--she cried pitifully to
herself. Meantime both suffered, she not knowing why, clinging to each
other the while more passionately than ever.

One night, however, coming down in her dressing-gown into the study in
search of a _Christian Year_ she had left behind her, she found Robert
with papers strewn before him, his arms on the table and his head laid
down upon them. He looked up as she came in, and the expression of his
eyes drew her to him irresistibly.

'Were you asleep, Robert? Do c