tinent, from
London. But as a matter of fact it was years since he had had any such
talk as this with an Englishman on English ground, and he suddenly
realised that he had been unwholesomely solitary, and that for the
scholar there is no nerve stimulus like that of an occasional
interchange of ideas with some one acquainted with his _Fach_.

'Who would ever have thought of discovering instincts and aptitudes of
such a kind in this long-legged optimist?' The squire shrugged his
shoulders as he thought of the attempt involved in such a personality to
combine both worlds, the world of action and the world of thought.
Absurd! Of course, ultimately one or other must go to the wall.

Meanwhile, what a ludicrous waste of time and opportunity that he and
this man should have been at cross-purposes like this! 'Why the deuce
couldn't he have given some rational account of himself to begin with!'
thought the squire irritably, forgetting, of course, who it was that had
wholly denied him the opportunity. 'And then the sending back of those
books: what a piece of idiocy!'

Granted an historical taste in this young parson, it was a curious
chance, Mr. Wendover reflected, that in his choice of a subject he
should just have fallen on the period of the later empire--of the
passage from the old world to the new, where the squire was a master.
The squire fell to thinking of the kind of knowledge implied in his
remarks, of the stage he seemed to have reached, and then to cogitating
as to the books he must be now in want of. He went back to his library,
ran over the shelves, picking out volumes here and there with an
unwonted glow and interest all the while. He sent for a case, and made a
youth who sometimes acted as his secretary pack them. And still as he
went back to his own work new names would occur to him, and full of the
scholar's avaricious sense of the shortness of time, he would shake his
head and frown over the three months which young Elsmere had already
passed, grappling with problems like Teutonic Arianism, the spread of
Monasticism in Gaul, and Heaven knows what besides, half a mile from the
man and the library which could have supplied him with the best help to
be got in England, unbenefited by either! Mile End was obliterated, and
the annoyance of the morning forgotten.

The next day was Sunday, a wet January Sunday, raw and sleety, the frost
breaking up on all sides and flooding the roads with mire.

Robert, rising in