ctice and uncommonly difficult. Try if you can do it, and
see!'

The weather held up in a gray, grudging, sort of way, and Mrs.
Thornburgh especially was all for braving the clouds and going on with
the expedition. It was galling to her that she herself would have to be
driven to Shanmoor behind the fat vicarage pony, while the others
would be climbing the fells, and all sorts of exciting things might be
happening. Still it was infinitely better to be half in it than not in
it at all, and she started by the side of the vicarage 'man,' in a most
delicious flutter. The skies might fall any day now. Elsmere had not
confided in her, though she was unable to count the openings she had
given him thereto. For one of the frankest of men he had kept his
secret, so far as words went, with a remarkable tenacity. Probably
the neighborhood of Mrs. Thornburgh was enough to make the veriest
chatterbox secretive. But notwithstanding, no one possessing the clue
could live in the same house with him these June days without seeing
that the whole man was absorbed, transformed, and that the crisis might
be reached at any moment. Even the vicar was eager and watchful, and
playing up to his wife in fine style, and if the situation had so worked
on the vicar, Mrs. Thornburgh's state is easier imagined than described.

The walk to Shanmoor need not be chronicled. The party kept together.
Robert fancied sometimes that there was a certain note of purpose in the
way in which Catherine clung to the vicar. If so, it did not disquiet
him. Never had she been kinder, more gentle. Nay, as the walk went on a
lovely gayety broke through her tranquil manner, as though she, like
the others, had caught exhilaration from the sharpened breeze and the
towering mountains, restored to all their grandeur by the storm clouds.

And yet she had started in some little inward trouble. She had promised
to join this walk to Shanmoor, she had promised to go with the others on
a picnic the following day, but her conscience was pricking her. Twice
this last fortnight had she been forced to give up a night-school she
held in a little lonely hamlet among the fells, because even she had
been too tired to walk there and back after a day of physical exertion.
Were not the world and the flesh encroaching? She had been conscious of
a strange inner restlessness as they all stood waiting in the road for
the vicar and Elsmere. Agnes had thought her looking depressed and pale,
and e