inrush of the Divine Spirit.

CHAPTER XLIV.

The saddest moment in the lives of these two persons whose history we
have followed for so long, was over and done with. Henceforward to the
end Elsmere and his wife were lovers as of old.

But that day and night left even deeper marks on Robert than on
Catherine. Afterward she gradually came to feel, running all through his
views of life, a note sterner, deeper, maturer than any present there
before. The reasons for it were unknown to her, though sometimes her own
tender, ignorant, remorse supplied them. But they were hidden deep in
Elsmere's memory.

A few days afterward he was casually told that Madame de Netteville had
left England for some time. As a matter of fact he never set eyes on her
again. After a while the extravagance of his self-blame abated. He
saw things as they were--without morbidness. But a certain boyish
carelessness of mood he never afterward quite recovered. Men and women
of all classes, and not only among the poor, became more real and more
tragic--moral truths more awful--to him. It was the penalty of a highly
strung nature set with exclusive intensity toward certain spiritual
ends.

On the first opportunity after that conversation with Hugh Flaxman which
had so deeply affected her, Catherine accompanied Elsmere to his Sunday
lecture. He tried a little, tenderly, to dissuade her. But she went,
shrinking and yet determined.

She had not heard him speak in public since that last sermon of his in
Murewell Church, every detail of which by long brooding had been burnt
into her mind. The bare Elgood Street room, the dingy outlook on the
high walls of a warehouse opposite, the lines of blanched, quick-eyed
artisans, the dissent from what she loved, and he had once loved,
implied in everything, the lecture itself, on the narratives of the
Passion; it was all exquisitely painful to her, and, yet, yet she was
glad to be there.

Afterward Wardlaw, with the brusque remark to Elsmere that 'any fool
could see he was getting done up,' insisted on taking the children's
class. Catherine, too, had been impressed, as she saw Robert raised
a little above her in the glare of many windows, with the sudden
perception that the worn, exhausted look of the preceding summer had
returned upon him. She held out her hand to Wardlaw with a quick, warm
word of thanks. He glanced at her curiously. What had brought her there
after all?

Then Robert, protesting that he w