some of the
High Churchman's parish troubles with a slight half-embarrassed smile.
The vicar of Nottingham was always in trouble. The narrative he was
pouring out took shape in Langham's sarcastic sense as a sort of
classical epic, with the High Churchman as a new champion of
Christendom, harassed on all sides by pagan parishioners, crass
churchwardens, and treacherous bishops. Catherine's fine face grew more
and more set, nay disdainful. Mr. Newcome was quite blind to it. Women
never entered into his calculations except as sisters or as penitents.
At a certain diocesan conference he had discovered a sympathetic fibre
in the young rector of Murewell, which had been to the imperious
persecuted zealot like water to the thirsty. He had come to-day, drawn
by the same quality in Elsmere as had originally attracted Langham to
the St. Anselm's undergraduate, and he sat pouring himself out with as
much freedom as if all his companions had been as ready as he was to die
for an alb, or to spend half their days in piously circumventing a
bishop.

But presently the conversation had slid, no one knew how, from
Nottingham and its intrigues to London and its teeming East. Robert was
leading, his eye now on the apostolic-looking priest, now on his wife.
Mr. Newcome resisted, but Robert had his way. Then it came out that
behind these battles of kites and crows at Mottringham, there lay an
heroic period, when the pale ascetic had wrestled ten years with London
poverty, leaving health and youth and nerves behind him in the _melee_.
Robert dragged it out at last, that struggle, into open view, but with
difficulty. The Ritualist may glory in the discomfiture of an Erastian
bishop--what Christian dare parade ten years of love to God and man? And
presently round Elsmere's lip there dawned a little smile of triumph.
Catherine had shaken off her cold silence, her Puritan aloofness, was
bending forward eagerly--listening. Stroke by stroke, as the words and
facts were beguiled from him, all that was futile and quarrelsome in the
sharp-featured priest sank out of sight; the face glowed with inward
light; the stature of the man seemed to rise; the angel in him
unsheathed its wings. Suddenly a story of the slums that Mr. Newcome was
telling--a story of the purest Christian heroism told in the simplest
way--came to an end, and Catherine leaned towards him with a long
quivering breath.

'Oh, thank you, thank you! That must have been a joy, a privil