as
_Gottbetrunken_ it was he--and yet not a word beyond what he felt to be
true, beyond what the intellect could grasp!'

Twenty minutes later Robert stood by the open grave. The rain beat down
on the black concourse of mourners. But there were blue spaces in the
drifting sky, and a wavering rainy light played at intervals over the
Wytham and Hinksey Hills, and over the butter-cupped river meadows,
where the lush hay-grass bent in long lines under the showers. To his
left, the provost, his glistening white head bare to the rain, was
reading the rest of the service.

As the coffin was lowered Elsmere bent over the grave. 'My friend, my
master,' cried the yearning filial heart, 'oh, give me something of
yourself to take back into life, something to brace me through this
darkness of our ignorance, something to keep hope alive as you kept it
to the end!'

And on the inward ear there rose, with the solemnity of a last message,
words which years before he had found marked in a little book of
Meditations borrowed from Grey's table--words long treasured and often
repeated--

'Amid a world of forgetfulness and decay, in the sight of his own
shortcomings and limitations, or on the edge of the tomb, he alone who
has found his soul in losing it, who in singleness of mind _has lived in
order to love and understand_, will find that the God who is near to him
as his own conscience has a face of light and love!'

Pressing the phrases into his memory, he listened to the triumphant
outbursts of the Christian service.

'Man's hope,' he thought, 'has grown humbler than this. It keeps now a
more modest mien in the presence of the Eternal Mystery; but is it in
truth less real, less sustaining? Let Grey's trust answer for me.'

He walked away absorbed, till at last in the little squalid street
outside the cemetery it occurred to him to look round for Langham.
Instead, he found Cathcart, who had just come up with him.

'Is Langham behind?' he asked. 'I want a word with him before I go.'

'Is he here?' asked the other with a change of expression.

'But of course! He was in the chapel. How could you----'

'I thought he would probably go away,' said Cathcart with some
bitterness. 'Grey made many efforts to get him to come and see him
before he became so desperately ill. Langham came once. Grey never asked
for him again.'

'It is his old horror of expression, I suppose,' said Robert troubled;
'his dread of being forced to take a lin