not without some inward struggle, had
accompanied her. Their mid-day meal was over, and Robert had been
devoting himself to Mary, who had been tottering round the room in his
wake, clutching one finger tight with her chubby hand. In particular, he
had been coaxing her into friendship with a wooden Japanese dragon which
wound itself in awful yet most seductive coils all round the cabinet at
the end of the room. It was Mary's weekly task to embrace this horror,
and the performance went by the name of 'kissing the Jabberwock.' It
had been triumphantly achieved, and, as the reward of bravery, Mary
was being carried round the room on her father's shoulder, holding on
mercilessly to his curls, her shining blue eyes darting scorn at the
defeated monster.

At last Robert deposited her on a rug beside a fascinating farm-yard
which lay there spread out for her, and stood looking, not at the child
but at his wife.

'Catherine, I feel so much as Mary did three minutes ago!'

She looked up startled. The tone was light, but the sadness, the emotion
of the eyes, contradicted it.

'I want courage,' he went on--'courage to tell you something that may
hurt you. And yet I ought to tell it.'

Her face took the shrinking expression which was so painful to him. But
she waited quietly for what he had to say.

'You know, I think,' he said, looking away from her to the gray Museum
outside, 'that my work in R---- hasn't been religious as yet at all. Oh,
of course, I have said things here and there, but I haven't delivered
myself in any way. Now there has come an opening.'

And he described to her--while she shivered a little and drew herself
together--the provocations which were leading him into a tussle with the
North R---- Club.

'They have given me a very civil invitation. They are the sort of men
after all whom it pays to get hold of, if one can. Among their fellows,
they are the men who think. One longs to help them to think to a little
more purpose.'

'What have you to give them, Robert?' asked Catherine, after a pause,
her eyes bent on the child's stocking she was knitting. Her heart was
full enough already, poor soul. Oh, the bitterness of this Passion week!
He had been at her side often in church, but through all his tender
silence and consideration she had divined the constant struggle in him
between love and intellectual honesty, and it had filled her with a dumb
irritation and misery indescribable. Do what she would, wres