mments on the music, a little lumbering
and infelicitous, as all his small-talk was. She hardly listened, but
presently she looked up nervously, compelled as it were by the great
melancholy eves above her.

We are not always in this turmoil Mr. Langham. Perhaps some other day
you will come and make friends with my mother?'

CHAPTER XXXII.

Naturally, it was during their two months of autumn travel that Elsmere
and Catherine first realized in detail what Elsmere's act was to mean
to them, as husband and wife, in the future. Each left England with the
most tender and heroic resolves. And no one who knows anything of life
will need to be told that even for these two finely natured people such
resolves were infinitely easier to make than to carry out.

'I will not preach to you--I will not persecute you!' Catherine had said
to her husband at the moment of her first shock and anguish. And she did
her utmost, poor thing! to keep her word. All through the innumerable
bitternesses which accompanied Elsmere's withdrawal from Murewell--the
letters which followed them, the remonstrances of public and private
friends, the paragraphs which found their way, do what they would, into
the newspapers--the pain of deserting, as it seemed to her, certain poor
and helpless folk who had been taught to look to her and Robert,
and whose bewildered lamentations came to them through young,
Armitstead--through all this she held her peace; she did her best to
soften Robert's grief; she never once reproached him with her own.

But at the same time the inevitable separation of their inmost hopes and
beliefs had thrown her back on herself, had immensely strengthened that
Puritan independent fibre in her which her youth had developed, and
which her happy marriage had only temporarily masked, not weakened.
Never had Catherine believed so strongly and intensely as now, when the
husband who had been the guide and inspirer of her religious life, had
given up the old faith and practices. By virtue of a kind of nervous
instinctive dread, his relaxations bred increased rigidity in her. Often
when she was alone--or at night--she was seized with a lonely, an awful
sense of responsibility. Oh! let her guard her faith, not only for her
own sake, her child's, her Lord's, but for his that it might be given to
her patience at last to lead him back.

And the only way in which it seemed to her possible to guard it was to
set up certain barriers of silence.