From her post beside the study window she watched him take the short cut across the cornfield. She was miserable, and all at sea. A week ago he had been so like himself again, and now--! Never had she seen him in anything like this state of physical and mental collapse. ‘Oh, Robert,’ she cried under her breath, with an abandonment like a child’s, strong soul that she was, ‘why won’t you tell me, dear? Why _won’t_ you let me share? I might help you through--I might.’ She supposed he must be again in trouble of mind. A weaker woman would have implored, tormented, till she knew all. Catherine’s very strength and delicacy of nature, and that respect which was inbred in her for the _sacra_ of the inner life, stood in her way. She could not catechise him, and force his confidence on this subject of all others. It must be given freely. And oh! it was so long in coming! Surely, surely, it must be mainly physical, the result of over-strain--expressing itself in characteristic mental worry, just as daily life reproduces itself in dreams. The worldly man suffers at such times through worldly things, the religious man through his religion. Comforting herself a little with thoughts of this kind, and with certain more or less vague preparations for departure, Catherine got through the morning as best she might. Meanwhile, Robert was trudging along to Thurston under a sky which, after a few threatening showers, promised once more to be a sky of intense heat. He had with him all the tackle necessary for spooning pike, a sport the novelty and success of which had hugely commended it the year before to, those Esau-like instincts Murewell had so much developed in him. And now, oh the weariness of the August warmth, and the long stretches of sandy road! By the time he reached the ponds he was tired out; but instead of stopping at the largest of the three, where a picturesque group of old brier cottages brought a remainder of man and his world into the prairie solitude of the common, he pushed on to a smaller pool just beyond, now hidden in a green cloud of birch-wood. Here, after pushing his way through the closely set trees, he made some futile attempts at fishing, only to put up his rod long before the morning was over, and lay it beside him on the bank. And there he sat for hours, vaguely watching the reflection of the clouds, the gambols and quarrel of the water-fowl, the ways of the birds, the alternations of sun and shadow on the softly moving trees--the real self of him passing all the while through an interminable inward drama, starting from the past, stretching to the future, steeped in passion, in pity, in regret.