hose strange ways of living were more the
result of certain longstanding delicacies of health than she had ever
allowed anyone to imagine. A few days of acute inflammation of the
lungs, borne with a patience and heroism which showed the Irish
character at its finest a moment of agonized wrestling with that terror
of death which had haunted the keen vivacious soul from its earliest
consciousness, ending in a glow of spiritual victory--Robert found
himself motherless. He and Catherine had never left her since the
beginning of the illness. In one of the intervals toward the end, when
there was a faint power of speech, she drew Catherine's cheek down to
her and kissed her.

'God bless you!' the old woman's voice said, with a solemnity in it
which Robert knew well, but which Catherine had never heard before. 'Be
good to him, Catherine--be always good to him!'

And she lay looking from the husband to the wife with a certain
wistfulness which pained Catherine, she knew not why. But she answered
with tears and tender words, and at last the mother's face settled into
a peace which death did but confirm.

This great and unexpected loss, which had shaken to their depths all the
feelings and affections of his youth, had thrown Elsmere more than ever
on his wife. To him, made as it seemed for love and for enjoyment, grief
was a novel and difficult burden. He felt with passionate gratitude that
his wife helped him to bear it so that he came out from it not lessened
but ennobled, that she preserved him from many a lapse of nervous
weariness and irritation into which his temperament might easily have
been betrayed.

And how his very dependence had endeared him to Catherine! That
vibrating responsive quality in him, so easily mistaken for mere
weakness, which made her so necessary to him--there is nothing perhaps
which wins more deeply upon a woman. For all the while it was balanced
in a hundred ways by the illimitable respect which his character and his
doings compelled from those about him. To be the strength, the inmost
joy, of a man who within the conditions of his life seems to you a hero
at every turn--there is no happiness more penetrating for a wife than
this.

On this August afternoon the Elsmeres were expecting visitors. Catherine
had sent the pony-carriage to the station to meet Rose and Langham,
who was to escort her from Waterloo. For various reasons, all
characteristic, it was Rose's first visit to Catherine's new