however, was
irresistible and had his way. He had taken a passion for Robert as for a
being of another order and another world. In the discussions which
generally followed the lecture he showed a receptiveness, an
intelligence, which were in reality a matter not of the mind but of the
heart. He loved, therefore he understood. At the club he stood for
Elsmere with a quivering spasmodic eloquence, as against Andrews and the
Secularists. One thing only puzzled Robert. Among all the little
fellow's sallies and indiscretions, which were not infrequent, no
reference to his home life was ever included. Here he kept even Robert
absolutely at arm's length. Robert knew that he was married and had
children, nothing more.

The old Scotchman, Macdonald, came out after the first lecture somewhat
crestfallen.

'Not the sort of stooff I'd expected!' he said, with a shade of
perplexity on the rugged face. 'He doosn't talk eneuf in the _aa_bstract
for me.'

But he went again, and the second lecture, on the origin of the Gospels,
got hold of him, especially as it supplied him with a whole armoury of
new arguments in support of Hume's doctrine of conscience, and in
defiance of 'that blatin' creetur, Reid.' The thesis with which Robert,
drawing on some of the stores supplied him by the squire's book, began
his account--_i.e._ the gradual growth within the limits of history of
man's capacity for telling the exact truth--fitted in, to the
Scotchman's thinking, so providentially with his own favourite
experimental doctrines as against the 'intueetion' folks, 'who will have
it that a babby's got as moch mind as Mr. Gladstone, ef it only knew
it!' that afterwards he never missed a lecture.

Lestrange was more difficult. He had the inherited temperament of the
Genevese _frondeur_, which made Geneva the headquarters of Calvinism in
the sixteenth century, and bids fair to make her the headquarters of
continental radicalism in the nineteenth. Robert never felt his wits so
much stretched and sharpened as when after the lecture Lestrange was
putting questions and objections with an acrid subtlety and persistence
worthy of a descendant of that burgher class which first built up the
Calvinistic system and then produced the destroyer of it in Rousseau.
Robert bore his heckling, however, with great patience and adroitness.
He had need of all he knew, as Murray Edwardes had warned him. But
luckily he knew a great deal; his thought was clearing and se