he ambitions with which it had filled her; the bewildering
many-coloured lights it had thrown upon life, the intoxicating sense of
artistic power. In vain.

'The stream will not flow, and the hills will not rise;
And the colours have all passed away from her eyes.'

She felt herself bereft, despoiled. And yet through it all, as she lay
weeping, there came flooding a strange contradictory sense of growth, of
enrichment. In such moments of pain does a woman first begin to live?
Ah! why should it hurt so--this long-awaited birth of the soul?

BOOK III

THE SQUIRE

CHAPTER XIX

The evening of the Murewell Hall dinner-party proved to be a date of
some importance in the lives of two or three persons. Rose was not
likely to forget it; Langham carried about with him the picture of the
great drawing-room, its stately light and shade, and its scattered
figures, through many a dismal subsequent hour; and to Robert it was the
beginning of a period of practical difficulties such as his fortunate
youth had never yet encountered.

His conjecture had hit the mark. The squire's sentiments towards him,
which had been on the whole friendly enough, with the exception of a
slight _nuance_ of contempt provoked in Mr. Wendover's mind by all forms
of the clerical calling, had been completely transformed in the course
of the afternoon before the dinner-party, and transformed by the report
of his agent. Henslowe, who knew certain sides of the squire's character
by heart, had taken Time by the forelock. For fourteen years before
Robert entered the parish he had been king of it. Mr. Preston, Robert's
predecessor, had never given him a moment's trouble. The agent had
developed a habit of drinking, had favoured his friends and spited his
enemies, and had allowed certain distant portions of the estate to go
finely to ruin, quite undisturbed by any sentimental meddling of the
priestly sort. Then the old rector had been gathered to the majority,
and this long-legged busybody had taken his place, a man, according to
the agent, as full of communistical notions as an egg is full of meat,
and always ready to poke his nose into other people's business. And as
all men like mastery, but especially Scotchmen, and as during even the
first few months of the new rector's tenure of office it became
tolerably evident to Henslowe that young Elsmere would soon become the
ruling force of the neighbourhood unless measures were taken to pre