eep out weather,' and he pointed to his own,
closely buttoned up. 'Your dress--I can't help being disrespectful under
the circumstances--will be wet through in ten minutes.'

Another silence. Then he overtook her.

'Please, Miss Leyburn,' he said, stopping her.

There was an instant's mute contest between them. The rain splashed on
the umbrellas. She could not help it, she broke down into the merriest,
most musical laugh of a child that can hardly stop itself, and he
joined.

'Mr. Elsmere, you are ridiculous!'

But she submitted. He put the mackintosh round her, thinking, bold man,
as she turned her rosy rain-dewed face to him, of Wordsworth's 'Louisa,'
and the poet's cry of longing.

And yet he was not so bold either. Even at this moment of exhilaration
he was conscious of a bar that checked and arrested. Something--what was
it?--drew invisible lines of defence about her. A sort of divine fear of
her mingled with his rising passion. Let him not risk too much too soon.

They walked on briskly, and were soon on the Whindale side of the pass.
To the left of them the great hollow of High Fell unfolded, storm-beaten
and dark, the river issuing from the heart of it like an angry voice.

What a change!' he said, coming up with her as the path widened. 'How
impossible that it should have been only yesterday afternoon I was
lounging up here in the heat, by the pool where the stream rises,
watching the white butter-flies on the turf, and reading "Laodamia!"'

'"Laodamia!"' she said, half sighing as she caught the name. 'Is it one
of those you like best?'

'Yes,' he said, bending forward that he might see her in spite of the
umbrella. How superb it is--the roll, the majesty of it; the severe,
chastened beauty of the main feeling, the individual lines!'

And he quoted line after line, lingering over the cadences.

'It was my father's favorite of all,' she said, in the low vibrating
voice of memory. 'He said the last verse to me the day before he died.'

Robert recalled it--

'Yet tears to human suffering are due,
And mortal hopes defeated and o'erthrown
Are mourned by man, and not by man alone
As fondly we believe.

Poor Richard Leyburn! Yet where had the defeat lain?

'Was he happy in his school life?' he asked, gently. 'Was teaching what
he liked?'

Oh yes--only--', Catherine paused and then added hurriedly, as though
drawn on in spite of herself by the grave