de her and gruffly invited her to
come home. "He wouldn't do her no mischief." Everybody dissuaded her,
but the plucky old thing went. A week or two afterwards she sent for me
and I found her crying. She was sure the lad was ill, he spoke to nobody
at his work. "Lord, sir!" she said, "it do remind me, when he sits
glowering at nights, of those folks in the Bible, when the devils inside
'em kep' a-tearing 'em. But he's like a new-born babe to me, sir--never
does me no 'arm. And it do go to my heart, sir, to see how poorly he do
take his vittles!" So I made tracks for that lad,' said Robert, his eyes
kindling, his whole frame dilating. 'I found him in the fields one
morning. I have seldom lived through so much in half an hour. In the
evening I walked him up to the Club, and we re-admitted him, and since
then the boy has been like one clothed and in his right mind. If there
is any trouble in the Club I set him on, and he generally puts it right.
And when I was laid up with a chill in the spring, and the poor fellow
came trudging up every night after his work to ask for me--well, never
mind! but it gives one a good glow at one's heart to think about it.'

The speaker threw back his head impulsively, as though defying his own
feeling. Langham looked at him curiously. The pastoral temper was a
novelty to him, and the strong development of it in the undergraduate of
his Oxford recollections had its interest.

'A quarter to six,' said Robert, as on their return from their walk they
were descending a low-wooded hill above the village, and the church
clock rang out. 'I must hurry, or I shall be late for my story-telling.'

'Story-telling!' said Langham, with a half-exasperated shrug. 'What
next? You clergy are too inventive by half!'

Robert laughed a trifle bitterly.

'I can't congratulate you on your epithets,' he said, thrusting his
hands far into his pockets. 'Good heavens, if we _were_--if we were
inventive as a body, the Church wouldn't be where she is in the rural
districts! My story-telling is the simplest thing in the world. I began
it in the winter with the object of somehow or other getting at the
_imagination_ of these rustics. Force them for only half an hour to
live some one else's life--it is the one thing worth doing with them.
That's what I have been aiming at. I _told_ my stories all the
winter--Shakespeare, Don Quixote, Dumas--Heaven knows what! And on the
whole it answers best. But now we are reading _The