at I could no more go on living to any purpose,
with a whole region of the mind shut up, as it were, barred away from
the rest of me, than I could go on living with a secret between myself
and you. I could not hold my faith by a mere tenure of tyranny and fear.
Faith that is not free--that is not the faith of the whole creature,
body, soul, and intellect--seemed to me a faith worthless both to God
and man!'

Catherine looked at him stupefied. The world seemed to be turning round
her. Infinitely more terrible than his actual words was the accent
running through words and tone and gesture--the accent of
irreparableness, as of something dismally _done_ and _finished_. What
did it all mean? For what had he brought her there? She sat stunned,
realising with awful force the feebleness, the inadequacy, of her own
fears.

He, meanwhile, had paused a moment, meeting her gaze with those yearning
sunken eyes. Then he went on, his voice changing a little,--

'But if I had wished it ever so much, I could not have helped myself.
The process, so to speak, had gone too far by the time I knew where I
was. I think the change must have begun before the Mile End time.
Looking back, I see the foundations were laid in--in--the work of last
winter.'

She shivered. He stooped and kissed her hands again passionately. 'Am I
poisoning even the memory of our past for you?' he cried. Then,
restraining himself at once, he hurried on again: 'After Mile End you
remember I began to see much of the squire. Oh, my wife, don't look at
me so! It was not his doing in any true sense. I am not such a weak
shuttlecock as that! But being where I was before our intimacy began,
his influence hastened everything. I don't wish to minimise it. I was
not made to stand alone!'

And again that bitter, perplexed, half-scornful sense of his own pliancy
at the hands of circumstance as compared with the rigidity of other men
descended upon him. Catherine made a faint movement as though to draw
her hands away.

'Was it well,' she said, in a voice which sounded like a harsh echo of
her own, 'was it right for a clergyman to discuss sacred things--with
such a man?'

He let her hands go, guided for the moment by a delicate imperious
instinct which bade him appeal to something else than love. Rising, he
sat down opposite to her on the low window seat, while she sank back
into her chair, her fingers clinging to the arm of it, the lamplight far
behind deepening all the s