s round he raced home again in order to secure an
hour with his books before luncheon.

The following day a note arrived, while they were at luncheon, in the
squire's angular precise handwriting. It contained a request that,
unless otherwise engaged, the rector would walk with Mr. Wendover that
afternoon.

Robert flung it across to Catherine.

'Let me see,' he said, deliberating, 'have I any engagement I must
keep?'

There was a sort of jealousy for his work within him contending with
this new fascination of the squire's company. But, honestly, there was
nothing in the way, and he went.

That walk was the first of many. The squire had no sooner convinced
himself that young Elsmere's society did in reality provide him with a
stimulus and recreation he had been too long without, than in his
imperious wilful way he began to possess himself of it as much as
possible. He never alluded to the trivial matters which had first
separated and then united them. He worked the better, he thought the
more clearly, for these talks and walks with Elsmere, and therefore
these talks and walks became an object with him. They supplied a
long-stifled want, the scholar's want of disciples, of some form of
investment for all that heaped-up capital of thought he had been
accumulating during a lifetime.

As for Robert, he soon felt himself so much under the spell of the
squire's strange and powerful personality that he was forced to make a
fight for it, lest this new claim should encroach upon the old ones. He
would walk when the squire liked, but three times out of four these
walks must be parish rounds, interrupted by descents into cottages and
chats in farmhouse parlours. The squire submitted. The neighbourhood
began to wonder over the strange spectacle of Mr. Wendover waiting
grimly in the winter dusk outside one of his own farmhouses while
Elsmere was inside, or patrolling a bit of lane till Elsmere should have
inquired after an invalid or beaten up a recruit for his confirmation
class, dogged the while by stealthy children, with fingers in their
mouths, who ran away in terror directly he turned.

Rumours of this new friendship spread. One day, on the bit of road
between the Hall and the rectory, Lady Helen behind her ponies whirled
past the two men, and her arch look at Elsmere said as plain as words,
'Oh, you young wonder! what hook has served you with this leviathan?'

On another occasion, close to Churton, a man in a cassock a