k as you can give to so great a subject.'

The squire drew himself up a little under his cloak and seemed to
consider. His tired eyes, fixed on the spring lane before them, saw in
reality only the long retrospects of the past. Then a light broke in
them, transformed them--a light of battle. He turned to the man beside
him, and his sharp look swept over him from head to foot. Well, if he
would have it, let him have it. He had been contemptuously content so
far to let the subject be. But Mr. Wendover, in spite of his philosophy,
had never been proof all his life against an anti-clerical instinct
worthy almost of a Paris municipal councillor. In spite of his fatigue
there woke in him a kind of cruel whimsical pleasure at the notion of
speaking, once for all, what he conceived to be the whole bare truth to
this clever attractive dreamer, to the young fellow who thought he could
condescend to science from the standpoint of the Christian miracles!

'Results?' he said interrogatively. 'Well, as you will understand, it is
tolerably difficult to summarise such a mass at a moment's notice. But I
can give you the lines of my last volumes, if it would interest you to
hear them.'

That walk prolonged itself far beyond Mr. Wendover's original intention.
There was something in the situation, in Elsmere's comments, or
arguments, or silences, which after a while banished the scholar's sense
of exhaustion and made him oblivious of the country distances. No man
feels another's soul quivering and struggling in his grasp without
excitement, let his nerve and his self-restraint be what they may.

As for Elsmere, that hour and a half, little as he realised it at the
time, represented the turning-point of life. He listened, he suggested,
he put in an acute remark here, an argument there, such as the squire
had often difficulty in meeting. Every now and then the inner protest of
an attacked faith would break through in words so full of poignancy, in
imagery so dramatic, that the squire's closely-knit sentences would be
for the moment wholly disarranged. On the whole, he proved himself no
mean guardian of all that was most sacred to himself and to Catherine,
and the squire's intellectual respect for him rose considerably.

All the same, by the end of their conversation that first period of
happy unclouded youth we have been considering was over for poor
Elsmere. In obedience to certain inevitable laws and instincts of the
mind, he had been f