as as though Catherine's figure
glided backward and forward beside him, across the smooth floor, as
though her hand were on his arm, her eyes shining into his. Ah--he knew
well what it was had made the sharpest sting of this wrestle through
which he had been passing! It was not merely religious dread, religious
shame; that terror of disloyalty to the Divine Images which have filled
the soul's inmost shrine since its first entry into consciousness, such
as every good man feels in a like strait. This had been strong indeed;
but men are men, and love is love! Ay, it was to the dark certainty of
Catherine's misery, that every advance in knowledge and intellectual
power had brought him nearer. It was from that certainty, that he now,
and for the last time, recoiled. It was too much. It could not be borne.

He walked home, counting up the engagements of the next few weeks--the
school-treat, two club field-days, a sermon in the county town, the
probable opening of the new Workmen's Institute, and so on. Oh! to be
through them all and away, away amid Alpine scents and silences. He
stood a moment beside the gray, slowly-moving river, half bidden beneath
the rank flower-growth, the tensy and willow-herb, the luxuriant elder
and trailing brambles of its August banks--and thought with hungry
passion of the clean-swept Alpine pasture, the fir-woods, and the
tameless mountain streams. In three weeks or less he and Catherine
should be climbing the Jaman or the Dent du Midi. And till then he would
want all his time for men and women. Books should hold him no more.

Catherine only put her arms round his neck in silence when he told her.
The relief was too great for words. He, too, held her close, saying
nothing. But that night, for the first time for weeks, Elsmere's wife
slept in peace and woke without dread of the day before her.

BOOK IV. CRISIS.

CHAPTER XXVI.

The next fortnight was a time of truce. Elsmere neither read nor
reasoned. He spent his days in the school, in the village, pottering
about the Mile End cottages, or the new institute--sometimes fishing,
sometimes passing long summer hours on the commons with his club boys,
hunting the ponds for caddises, newts, and water-beetles, peering into
the furze-bushes for second broods, or watching the sand-martins in the
gravel-pits, and trudging home at night in the midst of an escort of
enthusiasts, all of them with pockets as full and, miry as his own, to
deposit