y can't you do your
work and let the preaching alone?'

'Because,' said Robert, 'the preaching seems to me my work. There is the
great difference between us, Squire. You look upon knowledge as an end
in itself. It may be so. But to me knowledge has always been valuable
first and foremost for its bearing on life.'

'Fatal twist that,' returned the squire harshly. 'Yes, I know; it was
always in you. Well, are you happy? does this new crusade of yours give
you pleasure?'

'Happiness,' replied Robert, leaning against the chimneypiece and
speaking in a low voice, 'is always relative. No one knows it better
than you. Life is full of oppositions. But the work takes my whole heart
and all my energies.'

The squire looked at him in disapproving silence for a while.

'You will bury your life in it miserably,' he said at last; 'it will be
a toil of Sisyphus leaving no trace behind it; whereas such a book as
you might write, if you gave your life to it, might live and work, and
harry the enemy when you are gone.'

Robert forbore the natural retort.

The squire went round his library, making remarks, with all the caustic
shrewdness natural to him, on the new volumes that Robert had acquired
since their walks and talks together.

'The Germans,' he said at last, putting back a book into the shelves
with a new accent of distaste and weariness, 'are beginning to founder
in the sea of their own learning. Sometimes I think I will read no more
German. It is a nation of learned fools, none of whom ever sees an inch
beyond his own professorial nose.'

Then he stayed to luncheon, and Catherine, moved by many
feelings--perhaps in subtle striving against her own passionate sense of
wrong at this man's hands--was kind to him, and talked and smiled,
indeed, so much that the squire for the first time in his life took
individual notice of her, and as he parted with Elsmere in the hall made
the remark that Mrs. Elsmere seemed to like London, to which Robert,
busy in an opportune search for his guest's coat, made no reply.

'When are you coming to Murewell?' the squire said to him abruptly, as
he stood at the door muffled up as though it were December. 'There are a
good many points in that last article you want talking to about. Come
next month with Mrs. Elsmere.'

Robert drew a long breath, inspired by many feelings.

'I will come, but not yet. I must get broken in here more thoroughly
first. Murewell touches me too deeply, and my wif