which, as
Edmondson said, 'wrung the heart.'

'But in reality, under the husband's depression, and under the wife's
inexhaustible devotion, a combat was going on, which reached no third
person, but was throughout poignant and tragic to the highest degree.
Catherine was making her last effort, Robert his last stand. As we know,
ever since that passionate submission of the wife which had thrown her
morally at her husband's feet, there had lingered at the bottom of her
heart one last supreme hope. All persons of the older Christian type
attribute a special importance to the moment of death. While the man
of science looks forward to his last hour as a moment of certain
intellectual weakness, and calmly warns his friends before hand that he
is to be judged by the utterances of health and not by those of physical
collapse, the Christian believes that on the confines of eternity the
veil of flesh shrouding the soul grows thin and transparent, and
that the glories and the truths of Heaven are visible with a special
clearness and authority to the dying. It was for this moment, either
in herself or in him, that Catherine's unconquerable faith had been
patiently and dumbly waiting. Either she would go first, and death would
wing her poor last words to him with a magic and power not their
own; or, when he came to leave her, the veil of doubt would fall away
perforce from a spirit as pure as it was humble, and the eternal light,
the light of the Crucified, shine through.

Probably, if there had been no breach in Robert's serenity Catherine's
poor last effort would have been much feebler, briefer, more hesitating.
But when she saw him plunged for a short space in mortal discouragement
in a sombreness that as the days went on had its points and crests of
feverish irritation, her anguished pity came to the help of her creed.
Robert felt himself besieged, driven within the citadel, her being
urging, grappling with his. In little half-articulate words and ways, in
her attempts to draw him back to some of their old religious books and
prayers, in those kneeling vigils he often found her maintaining at
night beside him, he felt a persistent attack which nearly--in his
weakness--overthrew him.

For 'reason and thought grow tired like muscles and nerves.' Some of the
greatest and most daring thinkers of the world have felt this pitiful
longing to be at one with those who love them, at whatever cost, before
the last farewell. And the simp