s tone was
grave sympathy itself. 'Or would you rather confine yourself to
generalities and accomplished facts?'

'I will try and give you an account of it,' said Robert; and sitting
there with his elbows on his knees, his gaze fixed on the yellowing
afternoon sky, and the intricacies of the garden-walls between them and
the new Museum, he went through the history of the last two years. He
described the beginnings of his historical work, the gradual enlargement
of the mind's horizons, and the intrusion within them of question after
question, and subject after subject. Then he mentioned the squire's
name.

'Ah!' exclaimed Mr. Grey, 'I had forgotten you were that man's
neighbour. I wonder he didn't set you against the whole business,
inhuman old cynic!'

He spoke with the strong dislike of the idealist, devoted in practice to
an everyday ministry to human need, for the intellectual egotist. Robert
caught and relished the old pugnacious flash in the eye, the Midland
strength of accent.

'Cynic he is, not altogether inhuman, I think. I fought him about his
drains and his cottages, however,'--and he smiled sadly--'before I began
to read his books. But the man's genius is incontestable, his learning
enormous. He found me in a susceptible state, and I recognise that his
influence immensely accelerated a process already begun.'

Mr. Grey was struck with the simplicity and fulness of the avowal. A
lesser man would hardly have made it in the same way. Rising to pace up
and down the room--the familiar action recalling vividly to Robert the
Sunday afternoons of bygone years--he began to put questions with a
clearness and decision that made them so many guides to the man
answering, through the tangle of his own recollections.

'I see,' said the tutor at last, his hands in the pockets of his short
gray coat, his brow bent and thoughtful. 'Well, the process in you has
been the typical process of the present day. Abstract thought has had
little or nothing to say to it. It has been all a question of literary
and historical evidence. _I_ am old-fashioned enough'--and he
smiled--'to stick to the _a priori_ impossibility of miracles, but then
I am a philosopher! _You_ have come to see how miracle is manufactured,
to recognise in it merely a natural inevitable outgrowth of human
testimony, in its pre-scientific stages. It has been all experimental,
inductive. I imagine'--he looked up--'you didn't get much help out of
the orthodox ap