, her Lord's, but for his—that it might be given to her patience at last to lead him back.

And the only way in which it seemed to her possible to guard it was to set up certain barriers of silence. She feared that fiery persuasive quality in Robert she had so often seen at work on other people. With him conviction was life—it was the man himself, to an extraordinary degree. How was she to resist the pressure of those new ardours with which his mind was filling—she who loved him!—except by building, at any rate for the time, an enclosure of silence round her Christian beliefs? It was in some ways a pathetic repetition of the situation between Robert and the squire in the early days of their friendship, but in Catherine's mind there was no troubling presence of new knowledge conspiring from within with the forces without. At this moment of her life she was more passionately convinced than ever that the only knowledge truly worth having in this world was the knowledge of God's mercies in Christ.

So gradually with a gentle persistency she withdrew certain parts of herself from Robert's ken; she avoided certain subjects, or anything that might lead to them; she ignored the religious and philosophical books he was constantly reading; she prayed and thought alone—always for him, of him—but still resolutely alone. It was impossible, however, that so great a change in their life could be effected without a perpetual sense of breaking links, a perpetual series of dumb wounds and griefs on both[Pg 402] sides. There came a moment when, as he sat alone one evening in a pine wood above the Lake of Geneva, Elsmere suddenly awoke to the conviction that in spite of all his efforts and illusions, their relation to each other was altering, dwindling, impoverishing; the terror of that summer night at Murewell was being dismally justified.

His own mind during this time was in a state of perpetual discovery, 'sailing the seas where there was never sand'—the vast shadowy seas of speculative thought. All his life, reserve to those nearest to him had been pain and grief to him. He was one of those people, as we know, who throw off readily; to whom sympathy, expansion, are indispensable; who suffer physically and mentally from anything cold and rigid beside them. And now, at every turn, in their talk, their reading, in many of the smallest details of their common existence, Elsmere began to feel the presence of this cold and rigid something. He was ever conscious of self-defence on her side, of pained drawing