hat, of course, I
had to dig into the East, to learn several Oriental languages--Sanskrit
among them. Hebrew I already knew. Then, when I had got my languages, I
began to work steadily through the whole mass of existing records,
sifting and comparing. It is thirty years since I started. Fifteen years
ago I finished the section dealing with classical antiquity--with India,
Persia, Egypt, and Judaea. To-day I have put the last strokes to a
History of Testimony from the Christian era down to the sixth
century--from Livy to Gregory of Tours, from Augustus to Justinian.'

Elsmere turned to him with wonder, with a movement of irrepressible
homage. Thirty years of unbroken solitary labour for one end, one cause!
In our hurried fragmentary life, a purpose of this tenacity, this power
of realising itself, strikes the imagination.

'And your two books?'

'Were a mere interlude,' replied the squire briefly. 'After the
completion of the first part of my work, there were certain deposits
left in me which it was a relief to get rid of, especially in connection
with my renewed impressions of England,' he added drily.

Elsmere was silent, thinking this then was the explanation of the
squire's minute and exhaustive knowledge of the early Christian
centuries, a knowledge into which--apart from certain forbidden
topics--he had himself dipped so freely. Suddenly, as he mused, there
awoke in the young man a new hunger, a new unmanageable impulse towards
frankness of speech. All his nascent intellectual powers were alive and
clamorous. For the moment his past reticences and timidities looked to
him absurd. The mind rebelled against the barriers it had been rearing
against itself. It rushed on to sweep them away, crying out that all
this shrinking from free discussion had been at bottom 'a mere treason
to faith.'

'Naturally, Mr. Wendover,' he said at last, and his tone had a
half-defiant, half-nervous energy, 'you have given your best attention
all these years to the Christian problems.'

'Naturally,' said the squire drily. Then, as his companion still seemed
to wait, keenly expectant, he resumed, with something cynical in the
smile which accompanied the words,--

'But I have no wish to infringe our convention.'

'A convention was it?' replied Elsmere, flushing. 'I think I only wanted
to make my own position clear and prevent misunderstanding. But it is
impossible that I should be indifferent to the results of thirty years
such wor