since he had traveled it. He forgot his weakness, the
exhausting pressure and publicity of his new work. The past possessed
him, thrust out the present. Surely he had been up to London for the day
and was going back to Catherine!

At the station he hailed an old friend among the cabmen.

'Take me to the corner of the Murewell Lane, Tom. Then you may drive on
my bag to the Hall, and I shall walk over the common.'

The man urged on his tottering old steed with a will. In the streets of
the little town Robert saw several acquaintances who stopped and stared
at the apparition. Were the houses, the people real, or was it all a
hallucination--his flight and his return, so unthought of yesterday, so
easy and swift to-day?

By the time they were out on the wild ground between the market town and
Murewell, Robert's spirits were as buoyant as thistle-down. He and the
driver kept up an incessant gossip over the neighborhood, and he jumped
down from the carriage as the man stopped with the alacrity of a boy.

'Go on, Tom; see if I'm not there as soon as you.'

'Looks most uncommon bad,' the man muttered to himself as his horse
shambled off. 'Seems as spry as a lark all the same.'

Why, the gorse was out, positively out in January! and the thrushes were
singing as though it were March. Robert stopped opposite a bush covered
with timid, half-opened blooms, and thought he had seen nothing so
beautiful since he had last trodden that road in spring. Presently he
was in the same cart-track he had crossed on the night of his confession
to Catherine; he lingered beside the same solitary fir on the brink
of the ridge. A winter world lay before him; soft brown woodland, or
reddish heath and fern, struck sideways by the sun, clothing the earth's
bareness everywhere--curling mists--blue, points of distant hill--a gray
luminous depth of sky.

The eyes were moist, the lips moved. There in the place of his old
anguish he stood and blessed God!--not for any personal happiness, but
simply for that communication of Himself which may make every hour of
common living a revelation.

Twenty minutes later, leaving the park gate to his left, he hurried
up the lane leading to the Vicarage. One look! he might not be able to
leave the Squire later. The gate of the wood-path was ajar. Surely just
inside it he should find Catherine in her garden hat, the white-frocked
child dragging behind her! And there was the square stone house, the
brown cornfiel