g over you. I don't mean to release you from
it, but if I don't go in now, and finish the covering of those library
books, the youth of Murewell will be left without any literature till
Heaven knows when!'

He could have blessed her for the tone, for the escape into common
mundanity.

'Hang literature--hang the parish library!' he said with a laugh as he
moved after her. Yet his real inner feeling toward that parish library
was one of infinite friendliness.

'Hear these men of letters!' she said scornfully. But she was happy;
there was a glow on her cheek.

A bramble caught her dress; she stopped and laid her white hand to it,
but in vain. He knelt in an instant, and between them they wrenched it
away, but not till those soft slim fingers had several times felt the
neighborhood of his brown ones, and till there had flown through and
through him once more, as she stooped over him, the consciousness
that she was young, that she was beautiful, that she had pitied him so
sweetly, that they were alone.

'Rose!'

It was Catherine calling--Catherine, who stood at the end of the
grass-path, with eyes all indignation and alarm.

Langham rose quickly from the ground.

He felt as though the gods had saved him--or damned him--which?

CHAPTER XVII.

Murewell Rectory during the next forty-eight hours was the scene of much
that might have been of interest to a psychologist gifted with the power
of divining his neighbors.

In the first place Catherine's terrors were all alive again. Robert
had never seen her so moved since those days of storm and stress before
their engagement.

'I cannot bear it!' she said to Robert at night in their room. 'I cannot
bear it! I hear it always in my ears: "What hast thou done with thy
sister?" Oh, Robert, don't mind, dear, though he is your friend. My
father would have shrunk from him with horror--_An alien from the
household of faith! An enemy to the Cross of Christ!_'

She flung out the words with low intense emphasis and frowning brow,
standing rigid by the window, her hands locked behind her. Robert stood
by her much perplexed, feeling himself a good deal of a culprit, but
inwardly conscious that he knew a great deal more about Langham than she
did.

'My dear wife,' he said to her, 'I am certain Langham has no intention
of marrying.'

'Then more shame for him,' cried Catherine flushing, 'They could not
have looked more conscious, Robert, when I found them together, if he
ha