rwards at night as she knelt by her window
to think how much sheer pleasure the day had contained. Her life had
always had the tension of a bent bow. It seemed to her once or twice
during this fortnight as though something were suddenly relaxed in her,
and she felt a swift Bunyan-like terror of backsliding, of falling away.
But she never confessed herself fully; she was even blind to what her
perspicacity would have seen so readily in another's case--the little
arts and manoeuvres of those about her. It did not strike her that
Mrs. Thornburgh was more flighty and more ebullient than ever; that the
vicar's wife kissed her at odd times, and with a quite unwonted
effusion; or that Agnes and Rose, when they were in the wild heart of
the mountains, or wandering far and wide in search of sticks for a
picnic fire, showed a perfect genius for avoiding Mr. Elsmere, whom both
of them liked, and that in consequence his society almost always fell to
her. Nor did she ever analyse what would have been the attraction of
those walks to her without that tall figure at her side, that bounding
step, that picturesque impetuous talk. There are moments when Nature
throws a kind of heavenly mist and dazzlement round the soul it would
fain make happy. The soul gropes blindly on; if it saw its way it might
be timid and draw back, but kind powers lead it genially onward through
a golden darkness.

Meanwhile if she did not know herself, she and Elsmere learnt with
wonderful quickness and thoroughness to know each other. The two
households so near together, and so isolated from the world besides,
were necessarily in constant communication. And Elsmere made a most
stirring element in their common life. Never had he been more keen, more
strenuous. It gave Catherine new lights on modern character altogether
to see how he was preparing himself for this Surrey living--reading up
the history, geology, and botany of the Weald and its neighbourhood,
plunging into reports of agricultural commissions, or spending his quick
brain on village sanitation, with the oddest results sometimes, so far
as his conversation was concerned. And then in the middle of his
disquisitions, which would keep her breathless with a sense of being
whirled through space at the tail of an electric kite, the kite would
come down with a run, and the preacher and reformer would come hat in
hand to the girl beside him, asking her humbly to advise him, to pour
out on him some of that pra