He closed the ponderous doors behind him sadly. The magnificent pile, grander than ever in the sunny autumnal mist which unwrapped it, seemed to look after him as he walked away, mutely wondering that he should have allowed anything so trivial as a peasant’s grievance to come between him and its perfections. In the wooded lane outside the Rectory gate he overtook Catherine. He gave her his report, and they walked on together arm-in-arm, a very depressed pair. ‘What shall you do next?’ she asked him. ‘Make out the law of the matter,’ he said briefly. ‘If you get over the inspector,’ said Catherine anxiously, ‘I am tolerably certain Henslowe will turn out the people.’ He would not dare, Robert thought. At any rate, the law existed for such cases, and it was his bounden duty to call the inspector’s attention. Catherine’ did not see what good could be done thereby, and feared harm. But her wifely chivalry felt that he must get through his first serious practical trouble his own way. She saw that he felt himself distressingly young and inexperienced, and would not for the world have harassed him by over-advice. So she let him alone, and presently Robert threw the matter from him with a sigh. ‘Let it be awhile,’ he said with a shake of his long frame. ‘I shall get morbid over it if I don’t mind. I am a selfish wretch too. I know you have worries of your own, wifie.’ And he took her hand under the trees and kissed it with a boyish tenderness. ‘Yes,’ said Catherine, sighing, and then paused. ‘Robert,’ she burst out again, ‘I am certain that man made love of a kind to Rose. _He_ will never think of it again, but since the night before last she, to my mind, is simply a changed creature.’ ‘_I_ don’t see it,’ said Robert doubtfully. Catherine looked at him with a little angel scorn in her gray eyes. That men should make their seeing in such matters the measure of the visible! ‘You have been studying the Squire, sir--I have been studying Rose.’ Then she poured out her heart to him, describing the little signs of change and suffering her anxious sense had noted, in spite of Rose’s proud effort to keep all the world, but especially Catherine, at arm’s length. And at the end her feeling swept her into a denunciation of Langham, which was to Robert like a breath from the past, from those stern hills wherein he met her first. The happiness of their married life had so softened or masked all her ruggedness of character, that there was a certain joy in seeing those strong forces in her which had struck him first reappear. ‘Of course I feel myself to blame,’ he said when she stopped, ‘but how could one foresee, with such an inveterate hermit and recluse? And I owed him--I owe him--so much.’ ‘I know,’ said Catherine, but frowning still. It probably seemed to her that that old debt had been more than effaced.