es on Saturday. Oh, and,
Catherine, Mrs. Thornburgh says he _does_ care so much. Poor young man!'

And Mrs. Leyburn looked up at her now standing daughter with eyes as
woe-begone for Elsmere as for herself.

'Don't talk about it any more, mother,' Catherine implored. 'You won't
sleep, and I shall be more wroth with Mrs. Thornburgh than I am
already.'

Mrs. Leyburn let herself be gradually soothed and coerced, and
Catherine, with a last kiss to the delicate emaciated fingers on which
the worn wedding-ring lay slipping forward--in itself a history--left
her at last to sleep.

'And I don't know much more than when I began!' sighed the perplexed
widow to herself. 'Oh, I wish Richard was here--I do!'

Catherine's night was a night of intense mental struggle. Her struggle
was one with which the modern world has perhaps but scant sympathy.
Instinctively we feel such things out of place in our easy indifferent
generation. We think them more than half unreal. We are so apt to take
it for granted that the world has outgrown the religious thirst for
sanctification, for a perfect moral consistency, as it has outgrown so
many of the older complications of the sentiment of honour. And
meanwhile half the tragedy of our time lies in this perpetual clashing
of two estimates of life--the estimate which is the offspring of the
scientific spirit, and which is for ever making the visible world fairer
and more desirable in mortal eyes; and the estimate of Saint Augustine.

* * * * *

As a matter of fact, owing to some travelling difficulties, the vicar
and Elsmere did not get home till noon on Friday. Catherine knew nothing
of either delay or arrival. Mrs. Leyburn watched her with anxious
timidity, but she never mentioned Elsmere's name to any one on the
Friday morning, and no one dared speak of him to her. She came home in
the afternoon from the Backhouses' absorbed apparently in the state of
the dying girl, took a couple of hours' rest, and hurried off again. She
passed the vicarage with bent head, and never looked up.

'She is gone!' said Rose to Agnes as she stood at the window looking
after her sister's retreating figure. 'It is all over! They can't meet
now. He will be off by nine to-morrow.'

The girl spoke with a lump in her throat, and flung herself down by the
window, moodily watching the dark form against the fells. Catherine's
coldness seemed to make all life colder and more chilling--to f