e, she could find nothing
but embarrassed monosyllables, and still more embarrassed silences,
wherewith to answer him. Till at last he too fell silent, feeling once
more the sting of a now habitual discomfort.

Presently, however, Catherine came to sit down beside him. She laid her
head against his knee, saying nothing; but gathering his hand closely in
both her own.

Poor woman's heart! One moment in rebellion, the next a suppliant. He
bent down quickly and kissed her.

'Would you like,' he said presently, after both had sat silent awhile
in the firelight, 'would you care to go to Madame de Netteville's
to-night?'

'By all means' said Catherine, with a sort of eagerness. It _was_ Friday
she asked us for, wasn't it? We will be quick over dinner, and I will go
and dress.'

In that last ten minutes which Robert had spent with the Squire in his
bedroom, on the Monday afternoon, when they were to have walked,
Mr. Wendover had dryly recommended Elsmere to cultivate Madame de
Netteville. He sat propped up in his chair, white, gaunt, and cynical,
and this remark of his was almost the only reference he would allow to
the Elsmere move.

'You had better go there,' he said huskily, 'it will do you good. She
gets the first-rate people and she makes them talk, which Lady Charlotte
can't. Too many fools at Lady Charlotte's; she waters the wine too
much.'

And he had persisted with the subject--using it as Elsmere thought, as
a means of warding off other conversation. He would not ask Elsmere's
plans, and he would not allow a word about himself.

There had been a heart attack, old Meyrick thought, coupled with
signs of nervous strain and excitement. It was the last ailment which
evidently troubled the doctor most. But behind the physical breakdown,
there was to Robert's sense something else, a spiritual something,
infinitely forlorn and piteous, which revealed itself wholly against the
elder man's will, and filled the younger with a dumb helpless rush of
sympathy. Since his departure Robert had made the keeping up of his
correspondence with the Squire a binding obligation, and he was to-night
chiefly anxious to go to Madame de Netteville's that he might write an
account of it to Murewell.

Still the Squire's talk, and his own glimpse of her at Murewell, had
made him curious to see more of the woman herself. The Squire's ways
of describing her were always half approving, half sarcastic. Robert
sometimes imagined that he hi