hadows of the face, the hollows in the cheeks,
the line of experience and will about the mouth. The stupor in which she
had just listened to him was beginning to break up. Wild forces of
condemnation and resistance were rising in her; and he knew it. He knew,
too, that as yet she only half realised the situation, and that blow
after blow still remained to him to deal.

'Was it right that I should discuss religious matters with the squire?'
he repeated, his face resting on his hands. 'What are religious matters,
Catherine, and what are not?'

Then, still controlling himself rigidly, his eyes fixed on the shadowy
face of his wife, his ear catching her quick uneven breath, he went once
more through the dismal history of the last few months, dwelling on his
state of thought before the intimacy with Mr. Wendover began, on his
first attempts to escape the squire's influence, on his gradual pitiful
surrender. Then he told the story of the last memorable walk before the
squire's journey, of the moment in the study afterwards, and of the
months of feverish reading and wrestling which had followed. Half-way
through it a new despair seized him. What was the good of all he was
saying? He was speaking a language she did not really understand. What
were all these critical and literary considerations to her?

The rigidity of her silence showed him that her sympathy was not with
him, that in comparison with the vibrating protest of her own passionate
faith which must be now ringing through her, whatever he could urge must
seem to her the merest culpable trifling with the soul's awful
destinies. In an instant of tumultuous speech he could not convey to her
the temper and results of his own complex training, and on that
training, as he very well knew, depended the piercing, convincing force
of all that he was saying. There were gulfs between them--gulfs which,
as it seemed to him, in a miserable insight, could never be bridged
again. Oh, the frightful separateness of experience!

Still he struggled on. He brought the story down to the conversation at
the Hall, described--in broken words of fire and pain--the moment of
spiritual wreck which had come upon him in the August lane, his night of
struggle, his resolve to go to Mr. Grey. And all through he was not so
much narrating as pleading a cause, and that not his own, but Love's.
Love was at the bar, and it was for love that the eloquent voice, the
pale varying face, were really pleadin