lay awake half the night pondering. If he could but
pour out his heart! But though Catherine, the wife of his heart, of his
youth, is there, close beside him, doubt and struggle and perplexity are
alike frozen on his lips. He cannot speak without sympathy, and she will
not hear except under a moral compulsion which he shrinks more and more
painfully from exercising.

The next night was a story-telling night. He spent it in telling the
legend of St. Francis. When it was over he asked the audience to wait a
moment, and there and then--with the tender imaginative Franciscan
atmosphere, as it were, still about them--he delivered a short and
vigorous protest in the name of decency, good feeling, and common sense,
against the idiotic profanities with which the whole immediate
neighbourhood seemed to be reeking. It was the first time he had
approached any religious matter directly. A knot of workmen sitting
together at the back of the room looked at each other with a significant
grimace or two.

When Robert ceased speaking one of them, an elderly watchmaker, got up
and made a dry and cynical little speech, nothing moving but the thin
lips in the shrivelled mahogany face. Robert knew the man well. He was a
Genevese by birth, Calvinist by blood, revolutionist by development. He
complained that Mr. Elsmere had taken his audience by surprise; that a
good many of those present understood the remarks he had just made as an
attack upon an institution in which many of them were deeply interested;
and that he invited Mr. Elsmere to a more thorough discussion of the
matter, in a place where he could be both heard and answered.

The room applauded with some signs of suppressed excitement. Most of the
men there were accustomed to disputation of the sort which any Sunday
visitor to Victoria Park may hear going on there week after week.
Elsmere had made a vivid impression; and the prospect of a fight with
him had an unusual piquancy.

Robert sprang up. 'When you will,' he said. 'I am ready to stand by what
I have just said in the face of you all, if you care to hear it.'

Place and particulars were hastily arranged, subject to the approval of
the club committee, and Elsmere's audience separated in a glow of
curiosity and expectation.

'Didn't I tell ye?' the gasfitter's snarling friend said to him.
'Scratch him and you find the parson. These upper-class folk, when they
come among us poor ones, always seem to me just hunting for souls,