ughts.

After a pause he said, with a faint, inscrutable smile,--

'Your reminder is perfectly just. Naturally we all have our reserves.
Neither of us can be expected to stultify his own.'

And the talk went forward again, Robert joining in more buoyantly than
ever, perhaps because he had achieved a necessary but disagreeable thing
and got done with it.

In reality he had but been doing as the child does when it sets up its
sand-barrier against the tide.

CHAPTER XXIII.

It, was the beginning of April. The gorse was fast extending its golden
empire over the commons. On the sunny slopes of the copses primroses
were breaking through the hazel roots and beginning to gleam along the
edges of the river. On the grass commons between Murewell and Mile End
the birches rose like green clouds against the browns and purples of the
still leafless oaks and beeches. The birds were twittering and building.
Every day Robert was on the lookout for the swallows, or listening for
the first notes of the nightingale amid the bare spring coverts.

But the spring was less perfectly delightful to him than it might have
been, for Catherine was away. Mrs. Leyburn, who was to have come south
to them in February, was attacked by bronchitis instead at Burwood
and forbidden to move, even to a warmer climate. In March, Catherine,
feeling restless and anxious about her mother, and thinking it hard that
Agnes should have all the nursing and responsibility tore herself
from her man and her baby, and went north to Whindale for a fortnight,
leaving Robert forlorn.

Now, however, she was in London, whither she had gone for a few days on
her way home, to meet Rose and to shop. Robert's opinion was that all
women, even St. Elizabeths, have somewhere rooted in them an inordinate
partiality for shopping; otherwise why should that operation take four
or five mortal days? Surely with a little energy, one might buy up the
whole of London in twelve hours! However, Catherine lingered, and as
her purchases were made, Robert crossly supposed it must all be Rose's
fault. He believed that Rose spent a great deal too much on dress.

Catherine's letters, of course, were full of her sister. Rose, she said,
had come back from Berlin handsomer than ever, and playing, she supposed
magnificently. At any rate, the letters which followed her in shoals
from Berlin flattered her to the skies, and during the three months
preceding her return, Joachim himself had take