the farm homestead either rude and lawless or in constant
terror; the black spaces on many a brae side showed where dwellings had
been burned; more than once they passed skeletons depending from the
trees or lying rotting by the way-side. And it was frightful to Malcolm,
after his four years' absence, to find how little Lilias shared his
horror, taking quite naturally what to Alice Montagu would have seemed
beyond the bounds of possibility, and would have set Esclairmonde's soul
on fire, while Lilias seemed to think it her brother's amiable
peculiarity to be shocked, or to long to set such things straight.

He felt the truth of James Kennedy's words--that reformation could not be
the sole work of the King, but that his hands must be strengthened by all
the few who knew that a different state of things was possible, and that,
above all, the clergy needed to be awakened into vigour and intelligence.
Formerly, the miserable aspect of the country had merely terrified him,
and driven him to strive to hide his head in a convent; but the strength
and the sense of duty he had acquired had brought his heart to respond to
Kennedy's call to work.

Esclairmonde's words wrought within him beyond her own ken or purpose in
speaking them. He began to understand that to bury himself in an Italian
university and dive into Aristotle's sayings, to heap up his own memory
with the stores of thought he loved, or to plunge into the mazes of
mathematics, philosophy, and music, while his brethren in his own country
were tearing one another to pieces for lack of any good influence to
teach or show them better things, would be a storing of treasure for
himself on earth, a pursuit of the light of knowledge indeed, but not a
wooing of the light of Wisdom, the true Light of the World, as seen in
Him who went about doing good. To complete his present course was, he
knew, necessary. He had seen enough of really learned scholars to know
the depths of his own ignorance, and to be aware that certain books must
be read under guidance, and certain studies gone through, before his
cultivation would be on a level with the standard of the best working
clergy of the English Church--such as Chicheley, Waynflete, or the like.
He would therefore remain at Oxford, he thought, long enough to take his
Master of Arts degree, and then, though to his own perceptions only the
one-eyed among the blind, he would make the real sacrifice of himself in
the rude and cruel