'He comes back tonight, my dear--and he goes on Saturday. Oh, and, Catherine, Mrs. Thornburgh says he does care so much. Poor young man!'
And Mrs. Leyburn looked, up at her now standing daughter with eyes as woe-begone for Elsmere as for herself.
'Don't talk about it any more, mother,' Catherine implored. 'You won't sleep, and I shall be more wroth with Mrs. Thornbourgh than I am already.'
Mrs. Leyburn let herself be gradually soothed and coerced, and Catherine, with a last kiss to the delicate emaciated fingers on which the worn wedding ring lay slipping forward--in itself a history--left her at last to sleep.
'And I don't know much more than when I began!' sighed the perplexed widow to herself, 'Oh, I wish Richard was here--I do!'
Catherine's night was a night of intense mental struggle. Her struggle was one with which the modern world has perhaps but scant sympathy. Instinctively we feel such things out of place in our easy indifferent generation. We think them more than half unreal. We are so apt to take it for granted that the world has outgrown the religious thirst for sanctification; for a perfect moral consistency, as it has outgrown so many of the older complications of the sentiment of honor. And meanwhile half the tragedy of our time lies in this perpetual clashing of two estimates of life--the estimate which is the offspring of the scientific spirit, and which is forever making the visible world fairer and more desirable in mortal eyes; and the estimate of Saint Augustine.
As a matter of fact, owing to some travelling difficulties, the vicar and Elsmere did not get home till noon on Friday. Catherine knew nothing of either delay or arrival. Mrs. Leyburn watched her with anxious timidity, but she never mentioned Elsmere's name to any one on the Friday morning, and no one dared speak of him to her. She came home in the afternoon from the Backhouses' absorbed apparently in the state of the dying girl, took a couple of hours rest, and hurried off again. She passed the vicarage with bent head, and never looked up.
'She is gone!' said Rose to Agnes as she stood at the window looking after her sister's retreating figure, 'It is all over! They can't meet now. He will be off by nine to-morrow.'