‘You will have to send her to Berlin,’ said Elsmere after a pause. ‘You must play off her music against this unlucky feeling. If it exists it is your only chance.’ ‘Yes, she must go to Berlin,’ said Catherine slowly. Then presently she looked up, a flash of exquisite feeling breaking up the delicate resolution of the face. ‘I am not sad about that, Robert. Oh, how you have widened my world for me!’ Suddenly that hour in Marrisdale came back to her. They were in the woodpath. She crept inside her husband’s arm and put up her face to him, swept away by an overmastering impulse of self-humiliating love. The next day Robert walked over to the little market town of Churton, saw the discreet and long-established solicitor of the place, and got from him a complete account of the present state of the rural sanitary law. The first step clearly was to move the sanitary inspector; if that failed for any reason, then any _bonâ fide_ inhabitant had an appeal to the local sanitary authority, viz. the board of guardians. Robert walked home pondering his information, and totally ignorant that Henslowe, who was always at Churton on market-days, had been in the market-place at the moment when the Rector’s tall figure had disappeared within Mr. Dunstan’s office-door. That door was unpleasantly known to the agent in connection with some energetic measures for raising money he had been lately under the necessity of employing, and it had a way of attracting his eyes by means of the fascination that often attaches to disagreeable objects. In the evening Rose was sitting listlessly in the drawing-room. Catherine was not there, so her novel was on her lap and her eyes were staring intently into a world whereof they only had the key. Suddenly there was a ring at the bell. The servant came, and there were several voices and a sound of much shoe-scraping. Then the swing-door leading to the study opened and Elsmere and Catherine came out. Elsmere stopped with an exclamation. His visitors were two men from Mile End. One was old Milsom, more sallow and palsied than ever. As he stood bent almost double, his old knotted hand resting for support on the table beside him, everything in the little hall seemed to shake with him. The other was Sharland, the handsome father of the twins, whose wife had been fed by Catherine with every imaginable delicacy since Robert’s last visit to the hamlet. Even his strong youth had begun to show signs of premature decay. The rolling gypsy eyes were growing sunken, the limbs dragged a little. They had come to implore the Rector to let Mile End alone. Henslowe had been over there in the afternoon, and had given them all very plainly to understand that if Mr. Elsmere meddled any more they would be all turned out at a week’s notice to shift as they could, ‘And if you don’t find Thurston Common nice lying this weather, with the winter coming on, you’ll know who to thank for it,’ the agent had flung behind him as he rode off.