s and Rose, when they were in the wild heart
of the mountains, or wandering far and wide in search of sticks for a
picnic fire, showed a perfect genius for avoiding Mr. Elsmere, whom both
of them liked, and that in consequence his society almost always fell
to her. Nor did she ever analyze what would have been the attraction of
those walks to her without that tall figure at her side, that bounding
step, that picturesque impetuous talk. There are moments when nature
throws a kind of heavenly mist and dazzlement round the soul it would
fain make happy. The soul gropes blindly on; if it saw its way it might
be timid and draw back, but kind powers lead it genially onward through
a golden darkness.

Meanwhile if she did not know herself, she and Elsmere learned with
wonderful quickness and thoroughness to know each other. The two
households so near together, and so isolated from the world besides,
were necessarily in constant communication. And Elsmere made a most
stirring element in their common life. Never had he been more keen, more
strenuous. It gave Catherine new lights on modern character altogether
to see how he was preparing himself for this Surrey living--reading
up the history, geology, and botany of the Weald and its neighborhood,
plunging into reports of agricultural commissions, or spending his quick
brain on village sanitation, with the oddest results sometimes, so
far as his conversation was concerned. And then in the middle of his
disquisitions, which would keep her breathless with a sense of being
whirled through space at the tail of an electric kite, the kite would
come down with a run, and the preacher and reformer would come hat in
hand to the girl beside him, asking her humbly to advise him, to pour
out on him some of that practical experience of hers among the poor and
suffering, for the sake of which he would in an instant scornfully fling
out of sight all his own magnificent plannings. Never had she told so
much of her own life to anyone; her consciousness of it sometimes filled
her with a sort of terror, lest she might have been trading as it were,
for her own advantage, on the sacred things of God. But he would have
it. His sympathy, his sweetness, his quick spiritual feeling drew the
stories out of her. And then how his bright frank eyes would soften!
With what a reverence would he touch her hand when she said good-by!

And on her side she felt that she knew almost as much about Murewell as
he did