he matter,' he said briefly.

'If you get over the inspector,' said Catherine anxiously, 'I am
tolerably certain Henslowe will turn out the people.'

He would not dare, Robert thought. At any rate, the law existed for such
cases, and it was his bounden duty to call the inspector's attention.

Catherine' did not see what good could be done thereby, and feared harm.
But her wifely chivalry felt that he must get through his first
serious practical trouble his own way. She saw that he felt himself
distressingly young and inexperienced, and would not for the world have
harassed him by over-advice.

So she let him alone, and presently Robert threw the matter from him
with a sigh.

'Let it be awhile,' he said with a shake of his long frame. 'I shall get
morbid over it if I don't mind. I am a selfish wretch too. I know you
have worries of your own, wifie.'

And he took her hand under the trees and kissed it with a boyish
tenderness.

'Yes,' said Catherine, sighing, and then paused. 'Robert,' she burst
out again, 'I am certain that man made love of a kind to Rose. _He_
will never think of it again, but since the night before last she, to my
mind, is simply a changed creature.'

'_I_ don't see it,' said Robert doubtfully.

Catherine looked at him with a little angel scorn in her gray eyes. That
men should make their seeing in such matters the measure of the visible!

'You have been studying the Squire, sir--I have been studying Rose.'

Then she poured out her heart to him, describing the little signs of
change and suffering her anxious sense had noted, in spite of Rose's
proud effort to keep all the world, but especially Catherine, at arm's
length. And at the end her feeling swept her into a denunciation of
Langham, which was to Robert like a breath from the past, from those
stern hills wherein he met her first. The happiness of their married
life had so softened or masked all her ruggedness of character, that
there was a certain joy in seeing those strong forces in her which had
struck him first reappear.

'Of course I feel myself to blame,' he said when she stopped, 'but how
could one foresee, with such an inveterate hermit and recluse? And I
owed him--I owe him--so much.'

'I know,' said Catherine, but frowning still. It probably seemed to her
that that old debt had been more than effaced.

'You will have to send her to Berlin,' said Elsmere after a pause. 'You
must play off her music against this unlucky feel