s as though from her childhood till now she had lived in a moral world
whereof the aims, the dangers, the joys, were all she knew; and now
the walls of this world were crumbling round her, and strange lights,
strange voices, strange colors were breaking through. All the sayings
of Christ which had lain closest to her heart for years, tonight for
the first time seem to her no longer sayings of comfort or command, but
sayings of fire and flame that burn their coercing way through life and
thought. We recite so glibly, 'He that loseth his life shall save it;'
and when we come to any of the common crises of experience which are the
source and the sanction of the words, flesh and blood recoil. This
girl amid her mountains had carried religion as far as religion can
be carried before it meets life in the wrestle appointed it. The calm,
simple outlines of things are blurring before her eyes; the great placid
deeps of the soul are breaking up.

To the purest ascetic temper a struggle of this kind is hardly real.
Catherine felt a bitter surprise at her own pain. Yesterday a sort of
mystical exaltation upheld her. What had broken it down?

Simply a pair of reproachful eyes, a pale protesting face. What trifles
compared to the awful necessities of an infinite obedience! And yet they
haunt her, till her heart aches for misery, till she only yearns to be
counselled, to be forgiven, to be at least understood.

'Why, why am I so weak?' she cried in utter abasement of soul, and knew
not that in that weakness, or rather in the founts of character from
which it sprang, lay the innermost safeguard of her life.

CHAPTER IX.

Robert was very nearly reduced to despair by the scene with Catherine
we have described. He spent a brooding and miserable hour in the vicar's
study afterward, making up his mind as to what he should do. One phrase
of hers which had passed almost unnoticed in the shock of the moment was
now ringing in his ears, maddening him by a sense of joy just within his
reach, and yet barred away from him by an obstacle as strong as it was
intangible. '_We are not here only to be happy_,' she had said to him,
with a look of ethereal exaltation worthy of her namesake of Alexandria.
The words had slipped from her involuntarily in the spiritual tension of
her mood. They were now filling Robert Elsmere's mind with a tormenting,
torturing bliss. What could they mean? What had her paleness, her
evident trouble and weakness meant