ulation.'

Sir Mowbray Elsmere replied curtly in a day or two to the effect that
Robert's letter seemed to him superfluous. He, Sir Mowbray, had nothing
to do with his cousin's views. When the living was vacant--the present
holder, however, was uncommon tough and did not mean dying--he should
follow out the instructions of his father's will, and if Robert did not
want the thing he could say so.

In the autumn Robert and his mother went back to Oxford. The following
spring he redeemed his Oxford reputation completely by winning a
Fellowship at Merton after a brilliant fight with some of the best men
of his year, and in June he was ordained.

In the summer term some teaching work was offered him at Merton, and by
Mr. Grey's advice he accepted it, thus postponing for a while that
London curacy and that stout grapple with human need at its sorest for
which his soul was pining. 'Stay here a year or two,' Grey said bluntly;
'you are at the beginning of your best learning time, and you are not
one of the natures who can do without books. You will be all the better
worth having afterwards, and there is no lack of work here for a man's
moral energies.'

Langham took the same line, and Elsmere submitted. Three happy and
fruitful years followed. The young lecturer developed an amazing power
of work. That concentration which he had been unable to achieve for
himself his will was strong enough to maintain when it was a question of
meeting the demands of a college class in which he was deeply
interested. He became a stimulating and successful teacher, and one of
the most popular of men. His passionate sense of responsibility towards
his pupils made him load himself with burdens to which he was constantly
physically unequal, and fill the vacations almost as full as the terms.
And as he was comparatively a man of means, his generous impetuous
temper was able to gratify itself in ways that would have been
impossible to others. The story of his summer reading parties, for
instance, if one could have unravelled it, would have been found to be
one long string of acts of kindness towards men poorer and duller than
himself.

At the same time he formed close and eager relations with the heads of
the religious party in Oxford. His mother's Evangelical training of him
and Mr. Grey's influence, together, perhaps, with certain drifts of
temperament, prevented him from becoming a High Churchman. The
sacramental, ceremonial view of the Church