opposition a torment. He turned abruptly away, and Robert was left
alone.

It was a still, clear evening, rich in the languid softness and balm
which mark the first approaches of autumn. Elsmere walked back to the
house, his head uplifted to the sky which lay beyond the cornfield, his
whole being wrought into a passionate protest--a passionate invocation
of all things beautiful and strong and free, a clinging to life and
nature as to something wronged and outraged.

Suddenly his wife stood beside him. She had come down to warn him that
it was late and that Langham had gone to dress; but she stood lingering
by his side after her message was given, and he made no movement to go
in. He turned to her, the exaltation gradually dying out of his face,
and at last he stooped and kissed her with a kind of timidity unlike
him. She clasped both hands on his arm and stood pressing toward him
as though to make amends--for she knew not what. Something--some sharp,
momentary sense of difference, of antagonism, had hurt that inmost fibre
which is the conscience of true passion. She did the most generous,
the most ample penance for it as she stood there talking to him of
half-indifferent things, but with a magic, a significance of eye and
voice which seemed to take all the severity from her beauty and make her
womanhood itself.

At the evening meal Rose appeared in pale blue, and it seemed to
Langham, fresh from the absolute seclusion of college-rooms in vacation,
that everything looked flat and stale beside her, beside the flash of
her white arms, the gleam of her hair, the confident grace of every
movement. He thought her much too self-conscious and self-satisfied; and
she certainly did not make herself agreeable to him; but for all that he
could hardly take his eyes off her; and it occurred to him once or twice
to envy Robert the easy childish friendliness she showed to him, and
to him alone of the party. The lack of real sympathy between her and
Catherine was evident to the stranger at once--what, indeed, could the
two have in common? He saw that Catherine was constantly on the point
of blaming, and Rose constantly on the point of rebelling. He caught the
wrinkling of Catherine's brow as Rose presently, in emulation apparently
of some acquaintances she had been making in London, let slip the names
of some of her male friends without the 'Mr.,' or launched into some
bolder affectation than usual of a comprehensive knowledge of Lo