pped before
the Abbey and had said to him with emphasis: 'I never find myself in
this particular spot of London without a sense of emotion and reverence.
Other people feel that in treading the Forum of Rome they are at the
centre of human things. I am more thrilled by Westminster than Rome;
your venerable Abbey is to me the symbol of a nationality to which the
modern world owes obligations it can never repay. You are rooted deep in
the past; you have also a future of infinite expansiveness stretching
before you. Among European nations at this moment you alone have freedom
in the true sense, you alone have religion. I would give a year of life
to know what you will have made of your freedom and your religion two
hundred years hence!'

As Robert recalled the words, the Abbey lay before him, wrapped in the
bluish haze of the winter afternoon. Only the towers rose out of the
mist, gray and black against the red bands of cloud. A pair of pigeons
circled round them, as careless and free in flight as though they were
alone with the towers and the sunset. Below, the streets were full of
people; the omnibuses rolled to and fro; the lamps were just lit; lines
of straggling figures, dark in the half light, were crossing the street
here and there. And to all the human rush and swirl below, the quiet of
the Abbey and the infinite red distances of sky gave a peculiar pathos
and significance.

Robert filled his eye and sense, and then walked quickly away towards
the Embankment. Carrying the poetry and grandeur of England's past with
him, he turned his face eastward to the great new-made London on the
other side of St. Paul's, the London of the democracy, of the nineteenth
century, and of the future. He was wrestling with himself, a prey to one
of those critical moments of life, when circumstance seems once more to
restore to us the power of choice, of distributing a Yes or a No among
the great solicitations which meet the human spirit on its path from
silence to silence. The thought of his friend's reverence, and of his
own personal debt towards the country to whose long travail of centuries
he owed all his own joys and faculties, was hot within him.

'Here and here did England help me--how can I help England,--say!'

Ah! that vast chaotic London south and east of the great church! He
already knew something of it. A Liberal clergyman there, settled in the
very blackest, busiest heart of it, had already made him welcome on Mr.