ling desperately tired
and ill, and in after-life he never forgot the half-superstitious thrill
and deep sense of depression with which he received it. For within him
was a slowly-emerging, despairing conviction that he was indeed
physically unequal to the claims of his Oxford work, and if so, still
more unequal to grappling with the hardest pastoral labour and the worst
forms of English poverty. And the coincidence of the Murewell
incumbent's death struck his sensitive mind as a Divine leading.

But it was a painful defeat. He took the letter to Grey, and Grey
strongly advised him to accept.

'You overdrive your scruples, Elsmere,' said the Liberal tutor with
emphasis. 'No one can say a living with 1200 souls, and no curate, is a
sinecure. As for hard town work, it is absurd--you couldn't stand it.
And after all, I imagine, there are some souls worth saving out of the
towns.'

Elsmere pointed out vindictively that family livings were a corrupt and
indefensible institution. Mr. Grey replied calmly that they probably
were, but that the fact did not affect, so far as he could see,
Elsmere's competence to fulfil all the duties of rector of Murewell.

'After all, my dear fellow,' he said, a smile breaking over his strong
expressive face, 'it is well even for reformers to be sane.'

Mrs. Elsmere was passive. It seemed to her that she had foreseen it all
along. She was miserable about his health, but she too had a moment of
superstition, and would not urge him. Murewell was no name of happy omen
to her--she had passed the darkest hours of her life there.

In the end Robert asked for delay, which was grudgingly granted him.
Then he and his mother and friend fled over seas: he feverishly
determined to get well and cheat the fates. But, after a halcyon time in
Palestine and Constantinople, a whiff of poisoned air at Cannes, on
their way home, acting on a low constitutional state, settled matters.
Robert was laid up for weeks with malarious fever, and when he struggled
out again into the hot Riviera sunshine it was clear to himself and
everybody else that he must do what he could, and not what he would, in
the Christian vineyard.

'Mother,' he said one day, suddenly looking up at her as she sat near
him working, 'can _you_ be happy at Murewell?'

There was a wistfulness in the long thin face, and a pathetic accent of
surrender in the voice, which hurt the mother's heart.

'I can be happy wherever you are,' she said, lay