erine sweep a mass of miscellaneous _debris_ off a chair in
search of a seat, the small bright eyes would twinkle with something
that was certainly nearer amusement than shame.

And in a hundred other ways Mrs. Elsmere's relations with the poor of
the parish often made Catherine miserable. She herself had the most
angelic pity and tenderness for sorrows and sinners; but sin was sin to
her, and when she saw Mrs. Elsmere more than half attracted by the
stronger vices, and in many cases more inclined to laugh with what was
human in them than to weep over what was vile, Robert's wife would go
away and wrestle with herself, that she might be betrayed into nothing
harsh towards Robert's mother.

But fate allowed their differences, whether they were deep or shallow,
no time to develop. A week of bitter cold at the beginning of January
struck down Mrs. Elsmere, whose strange ways of living were more the
result of certain long-standing delicacies of health than she had ever
allowed any one to imagine. A few days of acute inflammation of the
lungs, borne with a patience and heroism which showed the Irish
character at its finest--a moment of agonised wrestling with that terror
of death which had haunted the keen vivacious soul from its earliest
consciousness, ending in a glow of spiritual victory--and Robert found
himself motherless. He and Catherine had never left her since the
beginning of the illness. In one of the intervals towards the end, when
there was a faint power of speech, she drew Catherine's cheek down to
her and kissed her.

'God bless you!' the old woman's voice said, with a solemnity in it
which Robert knew well, but which Catherine had never heard before. 'Be
good to him, Catherine--be always good to him!'

And she lay looking from the husband to the wife with a certain
wistfulness which pained Catherine, she knew not why. But she answered
with tears and tender words, and at last the mother's face settled into
a peace which death did but confirm.

This great and unexpected loss, which had shaken to their depths all the
feelings and affections of his youth, had thrown Elsmere more than ever
on his wife. To him, made as it seemed for love and for enjoyment, grief
was a novel and difficult burden. He felt with passionate gratitude that
his wife helped him to bear it so that he came out from it not lessened
but ennobled, that she preserved him from many a lapse of nervous
weariness and irritation into which his t