rifts of 'fair weather snow' on to the
window-sill, he went through an agony which no words can adequately
describe.

He must, of course, give up his living and his orders. His standards and
judgments had always been simple and plain in these respects. In other
men it might be right and possible that they should live on in the
ministry of the Church, doing the humane and charitable work of the
Church, while refusing assent to the intellectual and dogmatic framework
on which the Church system rests; but for himself it would be neither
right nor wrong, but simply impossible. He did not argue or reason about
it. There was a favourite axiom of Mr. Grey's which had become part of
his pupil's spiritual endowment, and which was perpetually present to
him at this crisis of his life, in the spirit, if not in the
letter--'_Conviction is the Conscience of the Mind._' And with this
intellectual conscience he was no more capable of trifling than with the
moral conscience.

The night passed away. How the rare intermittent sounds impressed
themselves upon him!--the stir of the child's waking soon after midnight
in the room overhead; the cry of the owls on the oak-wood; the purring
of the night-jars on the common; the morning chatter of the swallows
round the eaves.

With the first invasion of the dawn Robert raised himself and looked at
Catherine. She was sleeping with that light sound sleep which belongs to
health of body and mind, one hand under her face, the other stretched
out in soft relaxation beside her. Her husband hung over her in a
bewilderment of feeling. Before him passed all sorts of incoherent
pictures of the future; the mind was caught by all manner of incongruous
details in that saddest uprooting which lay before him. How her sleep,
her ignorance, reproached him! He thought of the wreck of all her pure
ambitions--for him, for their common work, for the people she had come
to love; the ruin of her life of charity and tender usefulness, the
darkening of all her hopes, the shaking of all her trust. Two years of
devotion, of exquisite self-surrender, had brought her to this! It was
for this he had lured her from the shelter of her hills, for this she
had opened to him all her sweet stores of faith, all the deepest springs
of her womanhood. Oh, how she must suffer! The thought of it and his own
helplessness wrung his heart.

Oh, could he keep her love through it all? There was an unspeakable
dread mingled with his grie