h exquisite youth? What girl would ever see in him anything but the
dull remains of what once had been a man!

CHAPTER XIII

The next day was Sunday. Langham, who was as depressed and home-sick as
ever, with a certain new spice of restlessness, not altogether
intelligible to himself, thrown in, could only brace himself to the
prospect by the determination to take the English rural Sunday as the
subject of severe scientific investigation. He would 'do it' thoroughly.

So he donned a black coat and went to church with the rest. There, in
spite of his boredom with the whole proceeding, Robert's old tutor was a
good deal more interested by Robert's sermon than he had expected to be.
It was on the character of David, and there was a note in it, a note of
historical imagination, a power of sketching in a background of
circumstance, and of biting into the mind of the listener, as it were,
by a detail or an epithet, which struck Langham as something new in his
experience of Elsmere. He followed it at first as one might watch a game
of skill, enjoying the intellectual form of it, and counting the good
points, but by the end he was not a little carried away. The peroration
was undoubtedly very moving, very intimate, very modern, and Langham up
to a certain point was extremely susceptible to oratory, as he was to
music and acting. The critical judgment, however, at the root of him
kept coolly repeating as he stood watching the people defile out of the
church: 'This sort of thing will go down, will make a mark; Elsmere is
at the beginning of a career!'

In the afternoon Robert, who was feeling deeply guilty towards his wife,
in that he had been forced to leave so much of the entertainment of
Langham to her, asked his old friend to come for him to the school at
four o'clock and take him for a walk between two engagements. Langham
was punctual, and Robert carried him off first to see the Sunday
cricket, which was in full swing. During the past year the young rector
had been developing a number of outdoor capacities which were probably
always dormant in his Elsmere blood, the blood of generations of country
gentlemen, but which had never had full opportunity before. He talked of
fishing as Kingsley might have talked of it, and, indeed, with constant
quotations from Kingsley; and his cricket, which had been good enough at
Oxford to get him into his College eleven, had stood him in specially
good stead with the Murewell villa