erest and wisest affection. Her quiet common
sense made itself heard, forbidding her to make too much of the change
in him, which might after all, she thought, be partly explained by the
mere physical results of his long strain of body and mind during the
Mile End epidemic. And for the rest she would not argue; she would not
inquire. She only prayed that she might so lead the Christian life
beside him, that the Lord's tenderness, the Lord's consolation, might
shine upon him through her. It had never been her wont to speak to him
much about his own influence, his own effect, in the parish. To the
austerer Christian considerations of this kind are forbidden: 'It is not
I, but Christ that worketh in me.' But now, whenever she came across any
striking trace of his power over the weak or the impure, the sick or the
sad, she would in some way make it known to him, offering it to him in
her delicate tenderness, as though it were a gift that the Father had
laid in her hand for him--a token that the Master was still indeed with
His servant, and that all was fundamentally well!

And so much, perhaps, the contact with his wife's faith, the power of
her love, wrought in Robert, that during these weeks and months he also
never lost his own certainty of emergence from the shadow which had
overtaken him. And, indeed, driven on from day to day as he was by an
imperious intellectual thirst which would be satisfied, the religion of
the heart, the imaginative emotional habit of years, that incessant
drama which the soul enacts with the Divine Powers to which it feels
itself committed, lived and persisted through it all. Feeling was
untouched. The heart was still passionately on the side of all its old
loves and adorations, still blindly trustful that in the end, by some
compromise as yet unseen, they would be restored to it intact.

Some time towards the end of July Robert was coming home from the Hall
before lunch, tired and worn, as the morning always left him, and
meditating some fresh sheets of the squire's proofs which had been in
his hands that morning. On the road crossing that to the rectory he
suddenly saw Reginald Newcome, thinner and whiter than ever, striding
along as fast as cassock and cloak would let him, his eyes on the
ground, and his wideawake drawn over them. He and Elsmere had scarcely
met for months, and Robert had lately made up his mind that Newcome was
distinctly less friendly, and wished to show it.

Elsmere had