ommended it
the year before to those Esau-like instincts Murewell had so much
developed in him.

And now--oh the weariness of the August warmth, and the long stretches
of sandy road! By the time he reached the ponds he was tired out; but
instead of stopping at the largest of the three, where a picturesque
group of old brick cottages brought a reminder of man and his works into
the prairie solitude of the common, he pushed on to a smaller pool just
beyond, now hidden in a green cloud of birch-wood. Here, after pushing
his way through the closely-set trees, he made some futile attempts at
fishing, only to put up his rod long before the morning was over and lay
it beside him on the bank. And there he sat for hours, vaguely watching
the reflection of the clouds, the gambols and quarrels of the waterfowl,
the ways of the birds, the alternations of sun and shadow on the
softly-moving trees,--the real self of him passing all the while through
an interminable inward drama, starting from the past, stretching to the
future, steeped in passion, in pity, in regret.

He thought of the feelings with which he had taken orders, of Oxford
scenes and Oxford persons, of the efforts, the pains, the successes of
his first year at Murewell. What a ghastly mistake it had all been! He
felt a kind of sore contempt for himself, for his own lack of
prescience, of self-knowledge. His life looked to him so shallow and
worthless. How does a man ever retrieve such a false step? He groaned
aloud as he thought of Catherine linked to one born to defeat her hopes,
and all that natural pride that a woman feels in the strength and
consistency of the man she loves. As he sat there by the water he
touched the depths of self-humiliation.

As to religious belief, everything was a chaos. What might be to him the
ultimate forms and condition of thought, the tired mind was quite
incapable of divining. To every stage in the process of destruction it
was feverishly alive. But its formative energy was for the moment gone.
The foundations were swept away, and everything must be built up afresh.
Only the _habit_ of faith held, the close instinctive clinging to a
Power beyond sense--a Goodness, a Will, not man's. The soul had been
stripped of its old defences, but at his worst there was never a moment
when Elsmere felt himself _utterly_ forsaken.

But his people--his work! Every now and then into the fragmentary debate
still going on within him there would flash li