that it was all so changed. The young fellows he saw
when he went back scorned everything he cared for. Every visit to Oxford
was like a stab to him. It seemed to him as if the place was full of men
'Who only wanted to destroy and break down everything that was sacred to
him.'

Elsmere reflected that Richard Leyburn must have left Oxford about the
beginning of the Liberal reaction, which followed Tractarianism, and in
twenty years transformed the University.

'Ah!' he said, smiling gently. 'He should have lived a little longer.
There is another turn of the tide since then. The destructive wave has
spent itself, and at Oxford now many of us feel ourselves on the upward
swell of a religious revival.'

Catherine looked up at him with a sweet sympathetic look. That dim
vision of Oxford, with its gray, tree-lined walls, lay very near to
her heart for her father's sake. And the keen face above her seemed to
satisfy and respond to her inner feeling.

'I know the High Church influence is very strong,' she said, hesitating;
'but I don't know whether father would have liked that much 'better.'

The last words had slipped out of her, and she checked herself suddenly.
Robert saw that she was uncertain as to his opinions, and afraid lest
she might have said something discourteous.

'It is not only the High Church influence,' he said quickly, 'it is a
mixture of influences from all sorts of quarters that has brought about
the new state of things. Some of the factors in the change were hardly
Christian at all, by name, but they have all helped to make men think,
to stir their hearts, to win them back to the old ways.'

His voice had taken to itself a singular magnetism. Evidently the
matters they were discussing were matters in which he felt a deep and
loving interest. His young boyish face had grown grave; there was a
striking dignity and weight in his look and manner, which suddenly
aroused in Catherine the sense that she was speaking to a man of
distinction, accustomed to deal on equal terms with the large things
of life. She raised her eyes to him for a moment, and he saw in them a
beautiful, mystical light--responsive, lofty, full of soul.

The next moment, it apparently struck her sharply that their
conversation was becoming incongruous with its surroundings. Behind
them Mrs. Thornburgh was bustling about with candies and music-stools,
preparing for a performance on the flute by Mr. Mayhew, the black-browed
vicar of Sha