e of children and old men, huddling in the shade of a
great chestnut.

Elsmere spent an hour in the building, helping and superintending,
stabbed every now and then by the unsuspecting friendliness of those
about him, or worried by their blunt comments on his looks. He could
not bear more than a glance into the new rooms apportioned to the
Naturalists' Club. There against the wall stood the new glass cases he
had wrung out of the Squire, with various new collections lying near,
ready to be arranged and unpacked when time allowed. The old collections
stood out bravely in the added space and light; the walls were hung here
and there with a wonderful set of geographical pictures he had carried
off from a London exhibition, and fed his boys on for weeks; the floors
were freshly matted; the new pine fittings gave out their pleasant
cleanly scent; the white paint of doors and windows shone in the
August sun. The building had been given by the Squire. The fittings and
furniture had been mainly of his providing. What uses he had planned for
it all!--only to see the fruits of two years' effort out of doors, and
personal frugality at home, handed over to some possibly unsympathetic
stranger. The heart beat painfully against the iron bars of fate,
rebelling against the power of a mental process so to affect a man's
whole practical and social life!

He went out at last by the back of the Institute, where a little bit of
garden, spoilt with building materials, led down to a lane.

At the end of the garden, beside the untidy gap in the hedge made by the
builders' carts, he saw a man standing, who turned away down the lane,
however, as soon as the Rector's figure emerged into view.

Robert had recognized the slouching gait and unwieldy form of Henslowe.
There were at this moment all kinds of gruesome stories afloat in the
village about the ex-agent. It was said that he was breaking up fast; it
was known that he was extensively in debt; and the village shopkeepers
had already held an agitated meeting or two, to decide upon the best
mode of getting their money out of him, and upon a joint plan of
cautious action toward his custom in future. The man, indeed, was
sinking deeper and deeper into a pit of sordid misery, maintaining all
the while a snarling, exasperating front to the world, which was rapidly
converting the careless half-malicious pity wherewith the village had
till now surveyed his fall, into that more active species of ba