as a week or two after the failure of the Wardlaw experiment. Do
what each would, the sore silence between the husband and wife was
growing, was swallowing up more of life.

'Shall I go, Catherine?' he asked, handing her the note.

'It would interest you,' she said gently, giving it back to him
scrupulously, as though she had nothing to do with it.

He knelt down before her, and put his arms round her, looking at her
with eyes which had a dumb and yet fiery appeal written in them. His
heart was hungry for that old clinging dependence, that willing weakness
of love, her youth had yielded him so gladly, instead of this silent
strength of antagonism. The memory of her Murewell self flashed
miserably through him as he knelt there, of her delicate penitence
toward him after her first sight of Newcome, of their night walks during
the Mile End epidemic. Did he hold now in his arms only the ghost and
shadow of that Murewell Catherine?

She must have read the reproach, the yearning of his look, for she
gave a little shiver, as though bracing herself with a kind of agony to
resist.

'Let me go, Robert!' she said gently, kissing him on the forehead and
drawing back. 'I hear Mary calling, and nurse is out.'

The days went on and the date of Madame de Netteville's dinner party
had come round. About seven o'clock that evening Catherine sat with the
child in the drawing-room, expecting Robert. He had gone off early
in the afternoon to the East End with Hugh Flaxman to take part in a
committee of workmen organized for the establishment of a choral union
in R----, the scheme of which had been Flaxman's chief contribution so
far to the Elgood Street undertaking.

It seemed to her as she sat there working, the windows open on to the
bit of garden, where the trees are already withered and begrimed, that
the air without and her heart within were alike stifling and heavy with
storm. _Something_ must put an end to this oppression, this misery! She
did not know herself. Her whole inner being seemed to her lessened and
degraded by this silent struggle, this fever of the soul, which made
impossible all those serenities and sweetnesses of thought in which her
nature had always lived of old. The fight into which fate had forced her
was destroying her. She was drooping like a plant cut off from all that
nourishes its life.

And yet she never conceived it possible that she should relinquish
that fight. Nay, at times there sprang up in her n