asions of strain since his boyhood there had been signs in him
of a certain lack of constitutional hardness which his mother knew very
well, but which his wife was only just beginning to recognize. However,
he laughed to scorn any attempt to restrain his constant goings and
comings, or those hours of night-nursing, in which, as the hospital
nurses were the first to admit, no one was so successful as the Rector.
And when he stood up on Sundays to preach in Murewell Church, the worn
and spiritual look of the man, and the knowledge warm at each heart of
those before him of how the Rector not only talked but lived, carried
every word home.

This strain upon all the moral and physical forces, however, strangely
enough, came to Robert as a kind of relief. It broke through a tension
of brain which of late had become an oppression. And for both him and
Catherine these dark times had moments of intensest joy, points of white
light illuminating heaven and earth.

There were cloudy nights--wet, stormy January nights--when sometimes
it happened to them to come back both together from the hamlet, Robert
carrying a lantern, Catherine clothed in waterproof from head to foot,
walking beside him, the rays flashing now on her face, now on the wooded
sides of the lane, while the wind howled through the dark vault of
branches overhead. And then, as they talked or were silent, suddenly
a sense of the intense blessedness of this comradeship of theirs would
rise like a flood in the man's heart, and he would fling his free arm
round her, forcing her to stand a moment in the January night and storm
while he said to her words of passionate gratitude, of faith in an
immortal union reaching beyond change or deaths lost in a kiss which was
a sacrament. Then there were the moments when they saw their child, held
high in Martha's arms at the window, and leaping toward her mother; the
moments when one pallid, sickly being after another was pronounced out
of danger; and by the help of them the weeks passed away.

Nor were they left without help from outside. Lady Helen Varley no
sooner heard the news than she hurried over. Robert on his way one
morning from one cottage to another saw her pony-carriage in the lane.
He hastened up to her before she could dismount.

'No, Lady Helen, you mustn't come here,' he said to her peremptorily, as
she held out her hand.

'Oh, Mr. Elsmere, let me. My boy is in town with his grandmother. Let me
just go through,