room seemed to him nearly dark. But the window was wide
open. The free, loosely growing branches of the plane trees made a dark,
delicate network against the luminous blue of the night. A cool air
came to him laden with an almost rural scent of earth and leaves. By the
window sat a white motionless figure. As he closed the door it rose
and walked toward him without a word. Instinctively Robert felt that
something unknown to him had been passing here. He paused, breathless,
expectant.

She came to him. She linked her cold, trembling fingers round his neck.

'Robert, I have been waiting so long--it was so late! I thought'--and
she choked down a sob-'perhaps something has happened to--him, we are
separated forever, and I shall never be able to tell him. Robert, Mr.
Flaxman talked to me; he opened my eyes; I have been so cruel to you, so
hard! I have broken my vow. I don't deserve it; but--_Robert!_----'

She had spoken with extraordinary self-command till the last word, which
fell into a smothered cry for pardon. Catherine Elsmere had very little
of the soft clingingness which makes the charm of a certain type of
woman. Each phrase she had spoken had seemed to take with it a piece of
her life. She trembled and tottered in her husband's arms.

He bent over her with half-articulate words of amazement, of passion. He
led her to her chair, and kneeling before her, he tried, so far as the
emotion of both would let him, to make her realize what was in his own
heart, the penitence and longing which had winged his return to her.
Without a mention of Madame de Netteville's name, indeed! _That_ horror
she should never know. But it was to it, as he held his wife, he owed
his poignant sense of something half-jeopardized and wholly recovered;
it was that consciousness in the background of his mind, ignorant of it
as Catherine was then and always, which gave the peculiar epoch-making
force to this sacred and critical hour of their lives. But she would
hear nothing of his self-blame--nothing. She put her hand across his
lips.

'I have seen things as they are, Robert,' she said very simply; 'while
I have been sitting here, and downstairs, after Mr. Flaxman left me.
You were right--I _would_ not understand. And, in a sense, I shall never
understand. I cannot change,' and her voice broke into piteousness. 'My
Lord is my Lord always--, but He is yours too. Oh, I know it, say
what you will! _That_ is what has been hidden from me; that is