Oh! But at last she thought she understood him. She had not passed her girlhood, side by side with a man of delicate fibre, of melancholy and scrupulous temperament, and within hearing of all the natural interests of a deeply religious mind, religious biography, religious psychology, and--within certain sharply defined limits--religious speculation, without being brought face to face with the black possibilities of ‘doubts’ and ‘difficulties’ as barriers in the Christian path. Has not almost every Christian of illustrious excellence been tried and humbled by them? Catherine, looking back upon her own youth, could remember certain crises of religious melancholy, during which she had often dropped off to sleep at night on a pillow wet with tears. They had passed away quickly, and for ever. But she went back to them now, straining her eyes through the darkness of her own past, recalling her father’s days of spiritual depression, and the few difficult words she had sometimes heard from him as to those bitter times of religious dryness and hopelessness, by which God chastens from time to time His most faithful and heroic souls. A half-contempt awoke in her for the unclouded serenity and confidence of her own inner life. If her own spiritual experience had gone deeper, she told herself with the strangest self-blame, she would have been able now to understand Robert better--to help him more. She thought as she lay awake after those painful moments in the study, the fears welling up slowly in the darkness, of many things that had puzzled her in the past. She remembered the book she had seen on his table; her thoughts travelled over his months of intercourse with the Squire; and the memory of Mr. Newcome’s attitude toward the man whom he conceived to be his Lord’s adversary, as contrasted with Robert’s, filled her with a shrinking pain she dare not analyze. Still all through, her feeling toward her husband was in the main akin to that of the English civilian at home toward English soldiers abroad, suffering and dying that England may be great. _She_ had sheltered herself all her life from those deadly forces of unbelief which exist in English society, by a steady refusal to know what, however, any educated university man must perforce know. But such a course of action was impossible for Robert. He had been forced into the open, into the fall tide of the Lord’s battle. The chances of that battle are many; and the more courage the more risk of wounds and pain. But the great Captain knows--the great Captain does not forget His own!