, arrest us, undeceive us, and the human yoke grows heavy
on our necks. Thenceforward we become merely sharers in the common woe.
Hemmed in on all sides, we feel our faculties only to realise their
impotence: we have time and strength to do what we _must_, never what we
will. Men go on repeating the words _work, genius, success_. Fools! Will
all these resounding projects, though they enable us to cheat ourselves,
enable us to cheat the icy fate which rules us and our globe, wandering
forsaken through the vast silence of the heavens?'

Robert looked up startled, the book dropping from his hand. The words
sent a chill to the heart of one born to hope, to will, to crave.

Suddenly Langham dashed the volume from him, almost with violence.

'Forget that drivel, Elsmere. It was a crime to show it to you. It is
not sane; neither perhaps am I. But I am not going to Scotland. They
would request me to resign in a week.'

Long after Elsmere, who had stayed talking a while on other things, had
gone, Langham sat on brooding over the empty grate.

'Corrupter of youth!' he said to himself once bitterly. And perhaps it
was to a certain remorse in the tutor's mind that Elsmere owed an
experience of great importance to his after life.

The name of a certain Mr. Grey had for some time before his entry at
Oxford been more or less familiar to Robert's ears as that of a person
of great influence and consideration at St. Anselm's. His tutor at
Harden had spoken of him in the boy's hearing as one of the most
remarkable men of the generation, and had several times impressed upon
his pupil that nothing could be so desirable for him as to secure the
friendship of such a man. It was on the occasion of his first interview
with the Provost, after the scholarship examination, that Robert was
first brought face to face with Mr. Grey. He could remember a short dark
man standing beside the Provost, who had been introduced to him by that
name, but the nervousness of the moment had been so great that the boy
had been quite incapable of giving him any special attention.

During his first term and a half of residence, Robert occasionally met
Mr. Grey in the quadrangle or in the street, and the tutor, remembering
the thin, bright-faced youth, would return his salutations kindly, and
sometimes stop to speak to him, to ask him if he were comfortably
settled in his rooms, or make a remark about the boats. But the
acquaintance did not seem likely to progre