ded, impatient
kind of creature at the best of times,' he confessed. 'They tell me that
great things have been done for the poor round here in the last twenty
years. Something has been done, certainly. But why are the old ways, the
old evil neglect and apathy, so long, so terribly long in dying? This
social progress of ours we are so proud of is a clumsy limping jade at
best!'

They prowled a little more about the hamlet, every step almost revealing
some new source of poison and disease. Of their various visits,
however, Langham remembered nothing afterwards but a little scene in a
miserable cottage, where they found a whole family party gathered round
the mid-day meal. A band of puny, black, black-eyed children were
standing or sitting at the table. The wife, confined of twins three
weeks before, sat by the fire, deathly pale, a 'bad leg' stretched out
before her on some improvised support, one baby on her lap and another
dark-haired bundle asleep in a cradle beside her. There was a pathetic
pinched beauty about the whole family. Even the tiny twins were
comparatively shapely; all the other children had delicate transparent
skins, large eyes, and small colourless mouths. The father, a
picturesque handsome fellow, looking as though he had gipsy blood in his
veins, had opened the door to their knock. Robert, seeing the meal,
would have retreated at once, in spite of the children's shy inviting
looks, but a glance past them at the mother's face checked the word of
refusal and apology on his lips, and he stepped in.

In after years Langham was always apt to see him in imagination as he
saw him then, standing beside the bent figure of the mother, his quick
pitiful eyes taking in the pallor and exhaustion of face and frame, his
hand resting instinctively on the head of a small creature that had
crept up beside him, his look all attention and softness as the woman
feebly told him some of the main facts of her state. The young rector at
the moment might have stood for the modern 'Man of Feeling,' as
sensitive, as impressionable, and as free from the burden of self, as
his eighteenth-century prototype.

On the way home Robert suddenly remarked to his companion, 'Have you
heard my sister-in-law play yet, Langham? What did you think of it?'

'Extraordinary!' said Langham briefly. 'The most considerable gift I
ever came across in an amateur.'

His olive cheek flushed a little involuntarily. Robert threw a quick
observant loo