rty broke up Langham found himself borne towards the outer
room, and before he knew where he was going he was standing beside her.

'Are _you_ here still?' she said to him, startled, as he held out his
hand. He replied by some comments on the music, a little lumbering and
infelicitous, as all his small-talk was. She hardly listened, but
presently she looked up nervously, compelled as it were by the great
melancholy eyes above her.

'We are not always in this turmoil, Mr. Langham. Perhaps some other day
you will come and make friends with my mother?'

CHAPTER XXXII

Naturally, it was during their two months of autumn travel that Elsmere
and Catherine first realised in detail what Elsmere's act was to mean to
them, as husband and wife, in the future. Each left England with the
most tender and heroic resolves. And no one who knows anything of life
will need to be told that even for these two finely-natured people such
resolves were infinitely easier to make than to carry out.

'I will not preach to you--I will not persecute you!' Catherine had said
to her husband at the moment of her first shock and anguish. And she did
her utmost, poor thing, to keep her word! All through the innumerable
bitternesses which accompanied Elsmere's withdrawal from Murewell--the
letters which followed them, the remonstrances of public and private
friends, the paragraphs which found their way, do what they would, into
the newspapers--the pain of deserting, as it seemed to her, certain poor
and helpless folk who had been taught to look to her and Robert, and
whose bewildered lamentations came to them through young
Armitstead--through all this she held her peace; she did her best to
soften Robert's grief; she never once reproached him with her own.

But at the same time the inevitable separation of their inmost hopes and
beliefs had thrown her back on herself, had immensely strengthened that
puritan independent fibre in her which her youth had developed, and
which her happy marriage had only temporarily masked, not weakened.
Never had Catherine believed so strongly and intensely as now, when the
husband, who had been the guide and inspirer of her religious life, had
given up the old faith and practices. By virtue of a kind of nervous
instinctive dread, his relaxations bred increased rigidity in her. Often
when she was alone--or at night--she was seized with a lonely, an awful
sense of responsibility. Oh! let her guard her faith, not