d detesting the blasphemies of his
error, she began to doubt whether it was right in her to allow her son
to live in her house and to eat at the same table with her;' and the
mother's heart, he remembered, could only be convinced of the lawfulness
of its own yearning by a prophetic vision of the youth's conversion.
He recalled, with a shiver, how, in the Life of Madame Guyon, after
describing the painful and agonizing death of a kind but comparatively
irreligious husband, she quietly adds, 'As soon as I heard that my
husband had just expired, I said to Thee, O my God, Thou hast broken my
bonds, and I will offer to Thee a sacrifice of praise!' He thought of
John Henry Newman, disowning all the ties of kinship with his younger
brother because of divergent views on the question of baptismal
regeneration; of the long tragedy of Blanco White's life, caused by the
slow dropping-off of friend after friend, on the ground of heretical
belief. What right had he, or any one in such a strait as his, to assume
that the faith of the present is no longer capable of the same stern
self-destructive consistency as the faith of the past? He knew that to
such Christian purity, such Christian inwardness as Catherine's, the
ultimate sanction and legitimacy of marriage rest, both in theory and
practice, on a common acceptance of the definite commands and promises
of a miraculous revelation. He had had a proof of it in Catherine's
passionate repugnance to the idea of Rose's marriage with Edward
Langham.

Eleven o'clock striking from the distant tower. He walked desperately
along the wood-path, meaning to go through the copse at the end of it
toward the park, and look there. He had just passed into the copse, a
thick interwoven mass of young trees, when he heard the sound of the
gate which on the further side of it led on to the road. He hurried on;
the trees closed behind him; the grassy path broadened; and there, under
an arch of young oak and hazel, stood Catherine, arrested by the sound
of his step. He, too, stopped at the sight of her; he could not go on.
Husband and wife looked at each other one long, quivering moment. Then
Catherine sprang forward with a sob and threw herself on his breast.

They clung to each other, she in a passion of tears--tears of such
self-abandonment as neither Robert nor any other living soul had ever
seen Catherine Elsmere shed before. As for him he was trembling from
head to foot, his arms scarcely strong enou