h spot. If the house had no beauty, it
commanded a world of loveliness. All around it--north, south, and
west--there spread, as it were, a vast playground of heather and wood
and grassy common, in which the few work-a-day patches of hedge and
ploughed land seemed engulphed and lost. Close under the rectory
windows, however, was a vast sloping cornfield, belonging to the glebe,
the largest and fruitfulest of the neighborhood. At the present moment
it was just ready for the reaper--the golden ears had clearly but a
few more days or hours to ripple in the sun. It was bounded by a dark
summer-scorched belt of wood, and beyond, over the distance, rose a blue
pointed bill, which seemed to be there only to attract and make a centre
for the sunsets.

As compared with her Westmoreland life, the first twelve months of
wifehood had been to Catherine Elsmere a time of rapid and changing
experience. A few days out of their honeymoon had been spent at Oxford.
It was a week before the opening of the October term, but many of the
senior members of the University were already in residence, and the
stagnation of the Long Vacation was over. Langham was up; so was Mr.
Grey, and many another old friend of Robert's. The bride and bridegroom
were much feted in a quiet way. They dined in many common rooms
and bursaries; they were invited to many luncheons, where at the
superabundance of food and the length of time spent upon it made the
Puritan Catherine uncomfortable; and Langham, devoted himself to taking
the wife through colleges and gardens, schools and Bodleian, in most
orthodox fashion, indemnifying himself afterward for the sense of
constraint her presence imposed upon him by a talk and a smoke with
Robert.

He could not understand the Elsmere marriage. That a creature so mobile,
so sensitive, so susceptible as Elsmere should have fallen in love with
this stately, silent woman, with her very evident rigidities of
thought and training, was only another illustration of the mysteries of
matrimony. He could not get on with her, and after a while did not try
to do so.

There could be no doubt as to Elsmere's devotion. He was absorbed,
wrapped up in her.

'She has affected him,' thought the tutor, 'at a period of life when
he is more struck by the difficulty of being morally strong than by the
difficulty of being intellectually clear. The touch of religious genius
in her braces him like the breath of an Alpine wind. One can see
him expa