allen him in Rome the year before.

Catherine found him poring over the letter, and, as it seemed to her,
oppressed by an anxiety out of all proportion to the news itself.

'They are not really troubled, I think,' she said, kneeling down beside
him, and laying her cheek against his. 'He will soon get over it,
Robert.'

But, alas! this mood, the tender characteristic mood of the old
Catherine, was becoming rarer and rarer with her. As the spring
expanded, as the sun and the leaves came back, poor Catherine's temper
had only grown more wintry and more rigid. Her life was full of moments
of acute suffering. Never, for instance, did she forget the evening
of Robert's lecture to the club. All the time he was away she had
sat brooding by herself in the drawing-room, divining with a bitter
clairvoyance all that scene in which he was taking part, her being
shaken with a tempest of misery and repulsion. And together with that
torturing image of a glaring room in which her husband, once Christ's
loyal minister, was employing all his powers of mind and speech to make
it easier for ignorant men to desert and fight against the Lord who
bought them, there mingled a hundred memories of her father which were
now her constant companions. In proportion as Robert and she became more
divided, her dead father resumed a ghostly hold upon her. There were
days when she went about rigid and silent, in reality living altogether
in the past, among the gray farms, the crags and the stony ways of the
mountains.

At such times her mind would be full of pictures of her father's
ministrations--his talks with the shepherds on the hills, with the women
at their doors, his pale dreamer's face beside some wild death-bed,
shining with the Divine message, the 'visions' which to her awe-struck
childish sense would often seem to hold him in their silent walks among
the misty hills.

Robert, taught by many small indications, came to recognize these states
of feeling in her with a dismal clearness, and to shrink more and more
sensitively while they lasted from any collision with her. He kept his
work, his friends, his engagements to himself, talking resolutely of
other things, she trying to do the same, but with less success, as her
nature was less pliant than his.

Then there would come moments when the inward preoccupation would give
way, and that strong need of loving, which was, after all, the basis
of Catherine's character, would break hungrily thro