they parted after watching a football match in the
damp mists of the Park, and the boy's flush of pleasure showed how much
he valued the permission.

For three years those Sunday half-hours were the great charm of Robert
Elsmere's life. When he came to look back upon them, he could remember
nothing very definite. A few interesting scraps of talk about books; a
good deal of talk about politics, showing in the tutor a living interest
in the needs and training of that broadening democracy on which the
future of England rests; a few graphic sayings about individuals; above
all, a constant readiness on the host's part to listen, to sit quiet,
with the slight unconscious look of fatigue which was so eloquent of a
strenuous intellectual life, taking kindly heed of anything that
sincerity, even a stupid awkward sincerity, had got to say--these were
the sort of impressions they had left behind them, reinforced always,
indeed, by the one continuous impression of a great soul speaking with
difficulty and labour, but still clearly, still effectually, through an
unblemished series of noble acts and efforts.

Term after term passed away. Mrs. Elsmere became more and more proud of
her boy, and more and more assured that her years of intelligent
devotion to him had won her his entire love and confidence, 'so long as
they both should live;' she came up to see him once or twice, making
Langham almost flee the University because she would be grateful to him
in public, and attending the boat-races in festive attire to which she
had devoted the most anxious attention for Robert's sake, and which made
her, dear, good, impracticable soul, the observed of all observers. When
she came she and Robert talked all day, so far as lectures allowed, and
most of the night, after their own eager, improvident fashion; and she
soon gathered, with that solemn, half-tragic sense of change which
besets a mother's heart at such a moment, that there were many new
forces at work in her boy's mind, deep under-currents of feeling,
stirred in him by the Oxford influences, which must before long rise
powerfully to the surface.

He was passing from a bright buoyant lad into a man, and a man of ardour
and conviction. And the chief instrument in the transformation was Mr.
Grey.

Elsmere got his first in Moderations easily. But the Final Schools were
a different matter. In the first days of his return to Oxford, in the
October of his third year, while he was still