. This annoying business had
wretchedly interrupted him, and his concessions left him mainly
conscious of a strong nervous distaste for the idea of any fresh
interview with young Elsmere. He had got his money and his apology; let
him be content.

However, next morning after breakfast Mr. Wendover once more saw his
study door open to admit the tall figure of the rector. The note and
cheque had reached Robert late the night before, and, true to his
new-born determination to make the best of the squire, he had caught up
his wideawake at the first opportunity and walked off to the Hall to
acknowledge the gift in person. The interview opened as awkwardly as it
was possible, and with their former conversation on the same spot fresh
in their minds both men spent a sufficiently difficult ten minutes. The
squire was asking himself, indeed, impatiently, all the time, whether he
could possibly be forced in the future to put up with such an experience
again, and Robert found his host, if less sarcastic than before,
certainly as impenetrable as ever.

At last, however, the Mile End matter was exhausted, and then Robert, as
good luck would have it, turned his longing eyes on the squire's books,
especially on the latest volumes of a magnificent German
_Weltgeschichte_ lying near his elbow, which he had coveted for months
without being able to conquer his conscience sufficiently to become the
possessor of it. He took it up with an exclamation of delight, and a
quiet critical remark that exactly hit the value and scope of the book.
The squire's eyebrows went up, and the corners of his mouth slackened
visibly. Half an hour later the two men, to the amazement of Mrs. Darcy,
who was watching them from the drawing-room window, walked back to the
park gates together, and what Robert's nobility and beauty of character
would never have won him, though he had worn himself to death in the
service of the poor and the tormented under the squire's eyes, a chance
coincidence of intellectual interest had won him almost in a moment.

The squire walked back to the house under a threatening sky, his
mackintosh cloak wrapped about him, his arms folded, his mind full of an
unwonted excitement.

The sentiment of long-past days--days in Berlin, in Paris, where
conversations such as that he had just passed through were the daily
relief and reward of labour, was stirring in him. Occasionally he had
endeavoured to import the materials for them from the Con