And Elsmere made a most stirring element in their common life.

Never had he been more keen, more strenuous.

It gave Catherine new lights on modern character altogether to see how he was preparing himself for this Surrey living--reading up the history, geology, and botany of the Weald and its neighborhood, plunging into reports of agricultural commissions, or spending his quick brain on village sanitation, with the oddest results sometimes, so far as his conversation was concerned.

And then in the middle of his disquisitions, which would keep her breathless with a sense of being whirled through space at the tail of an electric kite, the kite would come down with a run, and the preacher and reformer would come hat in hand to the girl beside him, asking her humbly to advise him, to pour out on him some of that practical experience of hers among the poor and suffering, for the sake of which he would in an instant scornfully fling out of sight all his own magnificent plannings.

Never had she told so much of her own life to anyone; her consciousness of it sometimes filled her with a sort of terror, lest she might have been trading as it were, for her own advantage, on the sacred things of God.