.
The spirit in them all is the same, answers eternally to reality; it
is but the letter, the fashion, the imagery, that are relative and
changing.'

He turned and walked homeward, struggling with a host of tempestuous
ideas as swift and varying as the autumn clouds hurrying overhead. And
then, through a break in a line of trees, he caught sight of the tower
and chancel window of the little church. In an instant he had a vision
of early summer mornings--dewy, perfumed, silent, save for the birds and
all the soft stir of rural birth and growth, of a chancel fragrant
with many flowers, of a distant church with scattered figures, of the
kneeling form of his wife close beside him, himself bending over
her, the sacrament of the Lord's death in his hand. The emotion, the
intensity, the absolute self-surrender of innumerable such moments
in the past--moments of a common faith, a common self-abasement--came
flooding back upon him. With a movement of joy and penitence he threw
himself at the feet of Catherine's Master and his own: '_Fix there thy
resting-place, my soul!_'

CHAPTER XX.

Catherine's later convalescence dwelt in her mind in after years as a
time of peculiar softness and peace. Her baby-girl throve; Robert had
driven the Squire and Henslowe out of his mind, and was all eagerness
as to certain negotiations with a famous naturalist for a lecture at
the village club. At Mile End, as though to put the Rector in the wrong,
serious illness had for the time disappeared; and Mrs. Leyburn's mild
chatter, as she gently poked about the house and garden, went out in
Catherine's pony-carriage, inspected Catherine's stores, and hovered
over Catherine's babe, had a constantly cheering effect on the still
languid mother. Like all theorists, especially those at secondhand, Mrs.
Leyburn's maxims had been very much routed by the event. The babe had
ailments she did not understand, or it developed likes and dislikes she
had forgotten existed in babies, and Mrs. Leyburn was nonplussed. She
would sit with it on her lap, anxiously studying its peculiarities. She
was sure it squinted, that its back was weaker than other babies, that
it cried more than hers had ever done. She loved to be plaintive; it
would have seemed to her unladylike to be too cheerful, even over a
first grandchild.

Agnes meanwhile made herself practically useful, as was her way, and
she did almost more than anybody to beguile Catherine's recovery by her
hours