usk by the edge of a little
dip of heather sheltered by a tuft of broom, when suddenly they heard
the purring sound of the night-jar and immediately after the bird itself
lurched past them, and as it disappeared into the darkness they caught
several times the characteristic click of the wing.

Catherine raised her hand and laid it on Robert's. The sudden tears
dropped on to her cheeks.

'Did you hear it, Robert?'

He drew her to him. These involuntary signs of an abiding pain in her
always smote him to the heart.

'I am not unhappy, Robert,' she said at last, raising her head. 'No;
if you will only get well and strong. I have submitted. It is not for
myself, but----'

For what then? Merely the touchingness of mortal things as such?--of
youth, of hope, of memory?

Choking down a sob, she looked seaward over the curling flame-colored
waves while he held her hand close and tenderly. No--she was not
unhappy. Something, indeed, had gone forever out of that early joy. Her
life had been caught and nipped in the great inexorable wheel of
things. It would go in some sense maimed to the end. But the bitter
self-torturing of that first endless year was over. Love, and her
husband, and the thousand subtle forces of a changing world had
conquered. She would live and die steadfast to the old faiths. But her
present mind and its outlook was no more the mind of her early married
life than the Christian philosophy of to-day is the Christian philosophy
of the Middle Ages. She was not conscious of change, but change there
was. She had, in fact, undergone that dissociation of the moral judgment
from a special series of religious formulae which is the crucial, the
epoch-making fact of our day. 'Unbelief,' says the orthodox preacher,
'is sin, and implies it:' and while he speaks, the saint in the
unbeliever gently smiles down his argument; and suddenly, in the rebel
of yesterday men see the rightful heir of to-morrow.

CHAPTER XLVII.

Meanwhile the Leyburns were at Burwood again. Rose's summer, indeed,
was much varied by visits to country houses--many of them belonging to
friends and acquaintances of the Flaxman family--by concerts, and the
demands of several new and exciting artistic friendships. But she was
seldom loath to come back to the little bare valley and the gray-walled
house. Even the rain which poured down in August, quite unabashed by any
consciousness of fine weather elsewhere, was not as intolerable to her
as in