ers. He
might even have followed them, but that a great retreat for clergy he
was just on the point of conducting made it impossible.

Flaxman went down with them to Dover. Rose, in the midst of all her new
and womanly care for her sister and Robert, was very sweet to him. In
any other circumstances, he told himself, he could easily have broken
down the flimsy barrier between them, but in those last twenty-four
hours he could press no claim of his own.

When the steamer cast loose, the girl, hanging over the side, stood
watching, the tall figure on the pier against the gray January sky.
Catherine caught her look and attitude, and could have cried aloud in
her own gnawing pain.

Flaxman got a cheery letter from Edmondson describing their arrival.
Their journey had gone well; even the odious passage from Marseilles had
been tolerable; little Mary had proved a model traveller; the villa was
luxurious, the weather good.

'I have got rooms close by them in the Vice-Consul's cottage,' wrote
Edmondson, 'Imagine, within sixty hours of leaving London in a January
fog, finding yourself tramping over wild marigolds and mignonette, under
a sky and through an air as balmy as those of an English June--when an
English June behaves itself. Elsmere's room overlooks the Bay, the great
plain of the Metidja dotted with villages, and the grand range of the
Djurjura, backed by snowy summits one can hardly tell from the clouds.
His spirits are marvellous. He is plunged in the history of Algiers,
raving about one Fromentin, learning Spanish even! The wonderful purity
and warmth of the air seem to have relieved the larynx greatly. He
breathes and speaks much more easily than when we left London. I
sometimes feel when I look at him as though in this as in all else
he were unlike the common sons of men--as though to _him_ it might be
possible to subdue even this fell disease.'

Elsmere himself wrote--

'"I had not heard the half"-Flaxman! An enchanted land--air, sun,
warmth, roses, orange blossom, new potatoes, green peas, veiled Eastern
beauties, domed mosques and preaching Mahdis--everything that feeds the
outer and the inner man. To throw the window open at waking to the depth
of sunlit air between us and the curve of the Bay, is for the moment
heaven! One's soul seems to escape one, to pour itself into the luminous
blue of the morning. I am better--I breathe again.'

'Mary flourishes exceedingly. She lives mostly on oranges, and has b