y outlet. Woe to him if he turn to
the right hand or the left--"I will repay, saith the Lord!"'

Elsmere drew himself up suddenly; the words seemed to him a blasphemy.
Then something stayed the vehement answer on his lips. It was a sense of
profound intolerable pity. What a maimed life! what an indomitable soul!
Husbandhood, fatherhood, and all the sacred education that flows from
human joy for ever self-forbidden, and this grim creed for recompense!

He caught Newcome's hand with a kind of filial eagerness.

'You are a perpetual lesson to me,' he said, most gently. 'When the
world is too much with me, I think of you and am rebuked. God bless you!
But I know myself. If I could see life and God as you see them for one
hour, I should cease to be a Christian in the next!'

A flush of something like sombre resentment passed over Newcome's face.
There is a tyrannical element in all fanaticism, an element which makes
opposition a torment. He turned abruptly away, and Robert was left
alone.

It was a still clear evening, rich in the languid softness and balm
which mark the first approaches of autumn. Elsmere walked back to the
house, his head uplifted to the sky which lay beyond the cornfield, his
whole being wrought into a passionate protest--a passionate invocation
of all things beautiful and strong and free, a clinging to life and
nature as to something wronged and outraged.

Suddenly his wife stood beside him. She had come down to warn him that
it was late and that Langham had gone to dress; but she stood lingering
by his side after her message was given, and he made no movement to go
in. He turned to her, the exaltation gradually dying out of his face,
and at last he stooped and kissed her with a kind of timidity unlike
him. She clasped both hands on his arm and stood pressing towards him as
though to make amends--for she knew not what. Something--some sharp
momentary sense of difference, of antagonism, had hurt that inmost fibre
which is the conscience of true passion. She did the most generous, the
most ample penance for it as she stood there talking to him of
half-indifferent things, but with a magic, a significance of eye and
voice which seemed to take all the severity from her beauty and make her
womanhood itself.

* * * * *

At the evening meal Rose appeared in pale blue, and it seemed to
Langham, fresh from the absolute seclusion of college rooms in vacation,
that everything