do!'

Catherine's night was a night of intense mental struggle. Her struggle
was one with which the modern world has perhaps but scant sympathy.
Instinctively we feel such things out of place in our easy indifferent
generation. We think them more than half unreal. We are so apt to take
it for granted that the world has outgrown the religious thirst for
sanctification; for a perfect moral consistency, as it has outgrown so
many of the older complications of the sentiment of honor. And meanwhile
half the tragedy of our time lies in this perpetual clashing of two
estimates of life--the estimate which is the offspring of the scientific
spirit, and which is forever making the visible world fairer and more
desirable in mortal eyes; and the estimate of Saint Augustine.

As a matter of fact, owing to some travelling difficulties, the vicar
and Elsmere did not get home till noon on Friday. Catherine knew nothing
of either delay or arrival. Mrs. Leyburn watched her with anxious
timidity, but she never mentioned Elsmere's name to any one on the
Friday morning, and no one dared speak of him to her. She came home in
the afternoon from the Backhouses' absorbed apparently in the state of
the dying girl, took a couple of hours rest, and hurried off again. She
passed the vicarage with bent head, and never looked up.

'She is gone!' said Rose to Agnes as she stood at the window looking
after her sister's retreating figure, 'It is all over! They can't meet
now. He will be off by nine to-morrow.'

The girl spoke with a lump in her throat, and flung herself down by the
window, moodily watching the dark form against the fells. Catherine's
coldness seemed to make all life colder and more chilling--to fling a
hard denial in the face of the dearest claims of earth.

The stormy light of the afternoon was fading toward sunset. Catherine
walked on fast toward the group of houses at the head of the valley, in
one of which lived the two old carriers who had worked such havoc with
Mrs. Thornburgh's housekeeping arrangements. She was tired physically,
but she was still more tired mentally. She had the bruised feeling of
one who has been humiliated before the world and before herself. Her
self-respect was for the moment crushed, and the breach made in the
wholeness of personal dignity had produced a strange slackness of nerve,
extending both to body and mind. She had been convicted, it seemed
to her, in her own eyes, and in those of her world, o