see that the battle-field is
falling into new lines. But the old truth remains the same. Where and
when and how you will, but somewhen and somehow, God created the heavens
and the earth!'

Langham said nothing. It had seemed to him for long that the clergy were
becoming dangerously ready to throw the Old Testament overboard, and all
that it appeared to him to imply was that men's logical sense is easily
benumbed where their hearts are concerned.

'Not that every one need be troubled with the new facts,' resumed Robert
after a while, going back to his pipe. 'Why should they? We are not
saved by Darwinism. I should never press them on my wife, for instance,
with all her clearness and courage of mind.'

His voice altered as he mentioned his wife--grew extraordinarily soft,
even reverential.

'It would distress her?' said Langham interrogatively, and inwardly
conscious of pursuing investigations begun a year before.

'Yes, it would distress her. She holds the old ideas as she was taught
them. It is all beautiful to her, what may seem doubtful or grotesque to
others. And why should I or any one else trouble her? I above all, who
am not fit to tie her shoe-strings.'

The young husband's face seemed to gleam in the dim light which fell
upon it. Langham involuntarily put up his hand in silence and touched
his sleeve. Robert gave him a quiet friendly look, and the two men
instantly plunged into some quite trivial and commonplace subject.

Langham entered his room that night with a renewed sense of pleasure in
the country quiet, the peaceful flower-scented house. Catherine, who was
an admirable housewife, had put out her best guest-sheets for his
benefit, and the tutor, accustomed for long years to the second-best of
college service, looked at their shining surfaces and frilled edges, at
the freshly matted floor, at the flowers on the dressing-table, at the
spotlessness of everything in the room, with a distinct sense that
matrimony had its advantages. He had come down to visit the Elsmeres,
sustained by a considerable sense of virtue. He still loved Elsmere and
cared to see him. It was a much colder love, no doubt, than that which
he had given to the undergraduate. But the man altogether was a colder
creature, who for years had been drawing in tentacle after tentacle, and
becoming more and more content to live without his kind. Robert's
parsonage, however, and Robert's wife had no attractions for him; and it
was with an