brely, yet more
indulgently.

'How much you always made of feeling,' he said after a little pause, 'in
a world where, according to me, our chief object should be not to feel!'

Then he began to hunt for his cap and gown. In another minute the two
made part of the crowd in the front quadrangle, where the rain was
sprinkling, and the insistent grief-laden voice of the bell rolled, from
pause to pause, above the gowned figures, spreading thence in wide waves
of mourning sound over Oxford.

The chapel service passed over Robert like a solemn pathetic dream. The
lines of undergraduate faces, the provost's white head, the voice of the
chaplain reading, the full male unison of the voices replying--how they
carried him back to the day when as a lad from school he had sat on one
of the chancel benches beside his mother, listening for the first time
to the subtle simplicity, if one may be allowed the paradox, of the
provost's preaching! Just opposite to where he sat now with Langham,
Grey had sat that first afternoon; the freshman's curious eyes had been
drawn again and again to the dark massive head, the face with its look
of reposeful force, of righteous strength. During the lesson from
Corinthians, Elsmere's thoughts were irrelevantly busy with all sorts of
mundane memories of the dead. What was especially present to him was a
series of Liberal election meetings in which Grey had taken a warm part,
and in which he himself had helped just before he took Orders. A hundred
odd, incongruous details came back to Robert now with poignant force.
Grey had been to him at one time primarily the professor, the
philosopher, the representative of all that was best in the life of the
University; now, fresh from his own grapple with London and its life,
what moved him most was the memory of the citizen, the friend and
brother of common man, the thinker who had never shirked action in the
name of thought, for whom conduct had been from beginning to end the
first reality.

The procession through the streets afterwards, which conveyed the body
of this great son of modern Oxford to its last resting-place in the
citizens' cemetery on the western side of the town, will not soon be
forgotten, even in a place which forgets notoriously soon. All the
University was there, all the town was there. Side by side with men
honourably dear to England, who had carried with them into one or other
of the great English careers the memory of the teacher, were