etext, till Rose and Agnes lost all inconvenient respect
for his cloth and Mrs. Leyburn sent him on errands; and he even insisted
that Catherine and the vicar should make use of him and his pastoral
services in one or two of the cases of sickness or poverty under their
care. Catherine, with a little more reserve than usual, took him one
day to the Tysons', and introduced him to the poor crippled son who was
likely to live on paralyzed for some time, under the weight, moreover,
of a black cloud of depression which seldom lifted. Mrs. Tyson Kept her
talking in the room, and she never forgot the scene. It showed her a new
aspect of a man whose intellectual life was becoming plain to her, while
his moral life was still something of a mystery. The look in Elsmere's
face as he sat bending over the maimed young farmer, the strength and
tenderness of the man, the diffidence of the few religious things he
said, and yet the reality and force of them, struck her powerfully. He
had forgotten her, forgotten everything save the bitter human need, and
the comfort it was his privilege to offer. Catherine stood answering
Mrs. Tyson at random, the tears rising in her eyes. She slipped out
while he was still talking, and went home strangely moved.

As to the festivities, she did her best to join in them. The sensitive
soul often reproached itself afterward for having juggled in the matter.
Was it not her duty to manage a little society and gayety for her
sisters sometimes? Her mother could not undertake it, and was always
plaintively protesting that Catherine would not be young. So for a short
week or two Catherine did her best to be young and climbed the mountain
grass, or forded the mountain streams with the energy and the grace of
perfect health, trembling afterward at night as she knelt by her window
to think how much sheer pleasure the day had contained. Her life had
always had the tension of a bent bow. It seemed to her once or twice
during this fortnight as though something were suddenly relaxed in her,
and she felt a swift Bunyan-like terror of backsliding, of falling away.
But she never confessed herself fully; she was even blind to what her
perspicacity would have seen so readily in another's case--the little
arts and maneuvers of those about her. It did not strike her that Mrs.
Thornburgh was more flighty and more ebullient than ever; that the
vicar's wife kissed her at odd times, and with a quite unwonted
effusion; or that Agne