 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 butterflies 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 favourite 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 sympathy of his look, 'I never knew anybody so good who thought himself of so little account. He always believed that he had missed everything, wasted everything, and that anybody else would have made infinitely more out of his life. He was always blaming, scourging himself. And all the time he was the noblest, [Pg 97]purest, most devoted——'

She stopped. Her voice had passed beyond her control. Elsmere was startled by the feeling she showed. Evidently he had touched one of the few sore places in this pure heart. It was as though her memory of her father had in it elements of almost intolerable pathos, as though the child's brooding love and loyalty were in perpetual protest, even now after
