'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.
'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.