disturbing memory of that strange scene between them would come to
make his present role less plausible, or some whim of hers made it
difficult to play, why then at bottom there was always the consciousness
that sixty hours, or thereabouts, would see him safely settled in that
morning train to London. Throughout it is probable that that morning
train occupied the saving background of his thoughts.

The two days passed by, and the squire's dinner-party arrived. About
seven on the Thursday evening a party of four might have been seen
hurrying across the park--Langham and Catherine in front, Elsmere and
Rose behind. Catherine had arranged it so, and Langham, who understood
perfectly that his friendship with her young sister was not at all to
Mrs. Elsmere's taste, and who had by now taken as much of a dislike to
her as his nature was capable of, was certainly doing nothing to make
his walk with her otherwise than difficult. And every now and then some
languid epigram would bring Catherine's eyes on him with a fiery gleam
in their gray depths. Oh, fourteen more hours and she would have shut
the rectory gate on this most unwelcome of intruders! She had never
felt so vindictively anxious to see the last of any one in her life.
There was in her a vehemence of antagonism to the man's manner, his
pessimism, his infidelity, his very ways of speaking and looking, which
astonished even herself.

Robert's eager soul meanwhile, for once irresponsive to Catherine's, was
full of nothing but the squire. At last the moment was come, and that
dumb spiritual friendship he had formed through these long months with
the philosopher and the savant was to be tested by sight and speech of
the man. He bade himself a hundred times pitch his expectations low. But
curiosity and hope were keen, in spite of everything.

Ah, those parish worries! Robert caught the smoke of Mile End in the
distance, curling above the twilight woods, and laid about him
vigorously with his stick on the squire's shrubs, as he thought of those
poisonous hovels, those ruined lives! But, after all, it might be mere
ignorance, and that wretch Henslowe might have been merely trading on
his master's morbid love of solitude.

And then--all men have their natural conceits. Robert Elsmere would not
have been the very human creature he was if, half-consciously, he had
not counted a good deal on his own powers of influence. Life had been to
him so far one long social success of th