'No matter. I will got some at home. Good-night!'

When he was gone she carried the child up to bed; her supper was brought
to her solitary in the dining-room; and afterward in the drawing-room,
where a soft twilight was fading into a soft and starlit night, she
mechanically brought out some work for Mary, and sat bending over it by
the window. After about an hour she looked up straight before her, threw
her work down, and slipped on to the floor, her head resting on the
chair.

The shock, the storm, had come. There for hours lay Catherine Elsmere
weeping her heart away, wrestling with herself, with memory, with God.
It was the greatest moral upheaval she had ever known--greater even than
that which had convulsed her life at Murewell.

CHAPTER XLIII.

Robert, tired and sick at heart, felt himself in no mood this evening
for a dinner-party in which conversation would be treated more or less
as a fine art. Liberal Catholicism had lost its charm; his sympathetic
interest in Montalembert, Lacordaire, Lamennais, had to be quickened,
pumped up again as it were, by great efforts, which were constantly
relaxed within him as he sped westward by the recurrent memory of that
miserable room, the group of men, the bleeding hand, the white dying
face.

In Madame de Netteville's drawing-room he found a small number of people
assembled. M. de Querouelle, a middle-sized, round-headed old gentleman
of a familiar French type; Lady Aubrey, thinner, more lath-like than
ever, clad in some sumptuous mingling of dark red and silver; Lord
Rupert, beaming under the recent introduction of a Land Purchase Bill
for Ireland, by which he saw his way at last to wash his hands of 'a
beastly set of tenants;' Mr. Wharncliffe, a young private secretary
with a waxed moustache, six feet of height, and a general air of
superlativeness which demanded, and secured attention; a famous
journalist, whose smiling, self-repressive look assured you that he
carried with him the secrets of several empires; and one Sir John
Headlam, a little black-haired Jewish-looking man with a limp--an
ex-Colonial Governor, who had made himself accepted in London as an
amusing fellow, but who was at least as much disliked by one half of
society as he was popular with the other.

'Purely for talk, you see, not for show!' said Madame de Netteville to
Robert, with a little smiling nod round her circle as they stood waiting
for the commencement of dinner.

'I shall hardl