that I may hear. Behold the ears of my heart, O Lord; open them and say
into my soul, "I am thy salvation!" I will follow after this voice of
Thine, I will lay hold on Thee. The temple of my soul, wherein Thou
shouldest enter, is narrow, do Thou enlarge it. It falleth into
ruins--do Thou rebuild it!... Woe to that bold soul which hopeth, if
it do but let Thee go, to find something better than Thee! It turneth
hither and thither, on this side and on that, and all things are hard
and bitter unto it. For Thou only art rest!... Whithersoever the soul of
man turneth it findeth sorrow, except only in Thee. Fix there, then, thy
resting-place, mm soul! Lay up in Him whatever thou hast received from
Him. Commend to the keeping of the Truth whatever the Truth hath given
thee, and thou shalt lose nothing. And thy dead things shall revive and
thy weak things shall be made whole!_'

She listened, appropriating and clinging to every word, till the nervous
clasp of the long delicate fingers relaxed, her head dropped a little,
gently, against the head of the child, and tired with much feeling she
slept.

Robert slipped away and strolled out into the garden in the
fast-gathering darkness. His mind was full of that intense spiritual
life of Catherine's which in its wonderful self-contentedness and
strength was always a marvel, sometimes a reproach to him. Beside her,
he seemed to himself a light creature, drawn hither and thither by this
interest and by that, tangled in the fleeting shows of things--the toy
and plaything of circumstance. He thought ruefully and humbly, as he
wondered on through the dusk, of his own lack of inwardness: 'Everything
divides me from Thee!' he could have cried in St. Augustine's manner.
'Books, and friends, and work--all seem to hide Thee from me. Why am I
so passionate for this and that, for all these sections and fragments of
Thee? Oh, for the One, the All! Fix, there thy resting-place, my soul!'

And presently, after this cry of self-reproach, he turned to muse on
that intuition of the world's pain which had been troubling Catherine,
shrinking from it even more than she had shrunk from it, in proportion
as his nature was more imaginative than hers. And Christ the only clew,
the only remedy--no other anywhere in this vast Universe, where all
men are under sentences of death, where the whole creation groaneth and
travaileth in pain together until now!

And yet what countless generations of men had borne