vertaken
him, till again the mind's quick life took voice.

'But what matter? God in the beginning--God in the prophets--in Israel's
best life--God in Christ! How are any theories about the Pentateuch to
touch that?'

And into the clear eyes, the young face aglow with wind and rain, there
leapt a light, a softness indescribable.

But the vivider and the keener grew this new mental life of Elsmere's,
the more constant became his sense of soreness as to that foolish and
motiveless quarrel which divided him from the squire. Naturally he was
for ever being harassed and pulled up in his work by the mere loss of
the Murewell library. To have such a collection so close, and to be cut
off from it, was a state of things no student could help feeling
severely. But it was much more than that: it was the man he hankered
after; the man who was a master where he was a beginner; the man who had
given his life to learning, and was carrying all his vast accumulations
sombrely to the grave, unused, untransmitted.

'He might have given me his knowledge,' thought Elsmere sadly, 'and
I--I--would have been a son to him. Why is life so perverse?'

Meanwhile he was as much cut off from the great house and its master as
though both had been surrounded by the thorn hedge of fairy tale. The
Hall had its visitors during these winter months, but the Elsmeres saw
nothing of them. Robert gulped down a natural sigh when one Saturday
evening, as he passed the Hall gates, he saw driving through them the
chief of English science side by side with the most accomplished of
English critics.

'"There are good times in the world and I ain't in 'em!"' he said to
himself with a laugh and a shrug as he turned up the lane to the
rectory, and then, boy-like, was ashamed of himself, and greeted
Catherine with all the tenderer greeting.

Only on two occasions during three months could he be sure of having
seen the squire. Both were in the twilight, when, as the neighbourhood
declared, Mr. Wendover always walked, and both made a sharp impression
on the rector's nerves. In the heart of one of the loneliest commons of
the parish Robert, swinging along one November evening through the
scattered furze bushes, growing ghostly in the darkness, was suddenly
conscious of a cloaked figure with slouching shoulders and head bent
forward coming towards him. It passed without recognition of any kind,
and for an instant Robert caught the long sharpened features and haughty