struggling to keep themselves
from the workhouse. You may think that I have no right to preach to
you--that you are the older man--that it is an intrusion. But what is
the good of blinking facts that you must know all the world knows? Come,
now, Mr. Henslowe, let us behave for a moment as though this were our
last meeting. Who knows? the chances of life are many. Lay down your
grudge against me, and let me speak to you as one struggling human being
to another. The fact that you have, as you say, become less prosperous,
in some sort through me, seems to give me a right--to make it a duty for
me, if you will--to help you if I can. Let me send a good doctor to see
you. Let me implore you as a last chance to put yourself into his
hands, and to obey him, and your wife; and let me,'--the rector
hesitated,--'let me make things pecuniarily easier for Mrs. Henslowe
till you have pulled yourself out of the hole in which, by common report
at least, you are now.'

Henslowe stared at him, divided between anger caused by the sore
stirring of his old self-importance, and a tumultuous flood of
self-pity, roused irresistibly in him by Robert's piercing frankness,
and aided by his own more or less maudlin condition. The latter
sensation quickly undermined the former; he turned his back on the
rector and leant over the railings of the lane, shaken by something it
is hardly worth while to dignify by the name of emotion. Robert stood
by, a pale embodiment of mingled judgment and compassion. He gave the
man a few moments to recover himself, and then, as Henslowe turned round
again, he silently and appealingly held out his hand--the hand of the
good man, which it was an honour for such as Henslowe to touch.
Constrained by the moral force radiating from his look, the other took
it with a kind of helpless sullenness.

Then, seizing at once on the slight concession, with that complete lack
of inconvenient self-consciousness, or hindering indecision, which was
one of the chief causes of his effect on men and women, Robert began to
sound the broken repulsive creature as to his affairs. Bit by bit,
compelled by a will and nervous strength far superior to his own,
Henslowe was led into abrupt and blurted confidences which surprised no
one so much as himself. Robert's quick sense possessed itself of point
after point, seeing presently ways of escape and relief which the
besotted brain beside him had been quite incapable of devising for
itself. They