o his own, his wrinkled eyes fixed on the intruder.

Robert, conscious of almost intolerable embarrassment, but maintaining
in spite of it an excellent degree of self-control, plunged at once into
business. He took the letter he had just received from the squire as a
text, made a good-humoured defence of his own proceedings, described his
attempt to move Henslowe, and the reluctance of his appeal from the man
to the master. The few things he allowed himself to say about Henslowe
were in perfect temper, though by no means without an edge.

Then, having disposed of the more personal aspects of the matter, he
paused, and looked hesitatingly at the face opposite him, more like a
bronzed mask at this moment than a human countenance. The squire,
however, gave him no help. He had received his remarks so far in perfect
silence, and seeing that there were more to come, he waited for them
with the same rigidity of look and attitude.

So, after a moment or two, Robert went on to describe in detail some of
those individual cases of hardship and disease at Mile End, during the
preceding year, which could be most clearly laid to the sanitary
condition of the place. Filth, damp, leaking roofs, foul floors,
poisoned water--he traced to each some ghastly human ill, telling his
stories with a nervous brevity, a suppressed fire, which would have
burnt them into the sense of almost any other listener. Not one of these
woes but he and Catherine had tended with sickening pity and labour of
body and mind. That side of it he kept rigidly out of sight. But all
that he could hurl against the squire's feeling, as it were, he gathered
up, strangely conscious through it all of his own young persistent
yearning to right himself with this man, whose mental history, as it
lay chronicled in these rooms, had been to him, at a time of
intellectual hunger, so stimulating, so enriching.

But passion and reticence and hidden sympathy were alike lost upon the
squire. Before he paused Mr. Wendover had already risen restlessly from
his chair, and from the rug was glowering down on his unwelcome visitor.

Good heavens! had he come home to be lectured in his own library by this
fanatical slip of a parson? As for his stories, the squire barely took
the trouble to listen to them.

Every popularity-hunting fool, with a passion for putting his hand into
other people's pockets, can tell pathetic stories; but it was
intolerable that his scholar's privacy should b