Robert might have stopped them, have cast the whole matter from him with one resolute effort. In other relations he had will enough and to spare. Was it an unexpected weakness of fibre that made it impossible?--that had placed him in this way at the Squire’s disposal? Half the world would answer yes. Might not the other half plead that in every generation there is a minority of these mobile, impressionable, defenseless natures, who are ultimately at the mercy of experience, at the mercy of thought, at the mercy (shall we say?) of truth; and that, in fact, it is from this minority that all human advance comes? During these three miserable months it cannot be said--poor Elsmere!--that he attempted any systematic study of Christian evidence. His mind was too much torn, his heart too sore. He pounced feverishly on one test point after another, on the Pentateuch, the Prophets, the relation of the New Testament to the thoughts and beliefs of its time, the Gospel of St. John, the evidence as to the Resurrection, the intellectual and moral conditions surrounding the formation of the Canon. His mind swayed hither and thither, driven from each resting-place in turn by the pressure of some new difficulty. And--let it be said again--all through, the only constant element in the whole dismal process was his trained historical sense. If he had gone through this conflict at Oxford, for instance, he would have come out of it unscathed; for he would simply have remained throughout it ignorant of the true problems at issue. As it was the keen instrument he had sharpened so laboriously on indifferent material, now ploughed its agonizing way, bit by bit, into the most intimate recesses of thought and faith. Much of the actual struggle he was able to keep from Catherine’s view, as he had vowed to himself to keep it. For after the Squire’s departure, Mrs. Darcy too went joyously up to London to flutter awhile through the golden alleys of Mayfair; and Elsmere was left once more in undisturbed possession of the Murewell library. There for a while on every day--oh, pitiful relief!--he could hide himself from the eyes he loved. But, after all, married love allows of nothing but the shallowest concealments. Catherine had already had one or two alarms. Once, in Robert’s study, among a tumbled mass of books he had pulled out in search of something missing, and which she was putting in order, she had come across that very book on the Prophecies which at a critical moment had so deeply affected Elsmere. It lay open and Catherine was caught by the heading of a section: ‘The Messianic Idea.’ She began to read, mechanically at first and read about a page. That page so shocked a mind accustomed to a purely traditional and mystical interpretation of the Bible that the book dropped abruptly from her hand, and she stood a moment by her husband’s table, her fine face pale and frowning.