f
I had your altruist, emotional temperament, I should not hesitate for
a moment. I should regard the historical expressions of an eternal
tendency in men as wholly indifferent to me. If I understand you aright,
you have flung away the sanctions of orthodoxy. There is no other in
the way. Treat words as they deserve. _You_'--and the speaker laid an
emphasis on the pronoun which for the life of him he could not help
making sarcastic--'_you_ will always have Gospel enough to preach.'

'I cannot,' Robert repeated quietly, unmoved by the taunt, if it was
one. 'I am in a different state, I imagine, from you. Words--that is to
say, the specific Christian formulae--may be indifferent to you, though
a month or two ago I should hardly have guessed it; they are just now
anything but indifferent to me.'

The Squire's brow grew darker. He took up the argument again, more
pugnaciously than ever. It was the strangest attempt ever made to gibe
and flout a wandering sheep, back into the fold. Robert's resentment was
roused at last. The Squire's temper seemed to him totally inexplicable,
his arguments contradictory, the conversation useless and irritating. He
got up to take his leave.

'What you are about to do, Elsmere,' the Squire wound up with saturnine
emphasis, 'is apiece of cowardice! You will live bitterly to regret the
haste and the unreason of it.'

'There has been no haste,' exclaimed Robert in the low tone of
passionate emotion; 'I have not rooted up the most sacred growths of
life as a careless child devastates its garden. There are some things
which a man only does because he _must_.'

There was a pause. Robert held out his hand. The Squire could hardly
touch it. Outwardly his mood was one of the strangest eccentricity and
anger; and as to what was beneath it, Elsmere's quick divination was
dulled by worry and fatigue. It only served him so far that at the door
he turned back, hat in hand, and said, looking lingeringly the while
at the solitary sombre figure, at the great library, with all its
suggestive and exquisite detail: 'If Monday is fine, Squire, will you
walk?'

The Squire made no reply except by another question,--

'Do you still keep to your Swiss plans for next week?' he asked sharply.

'Certainly. The plan, as it happens, is a Godsend. But there,' said
Robert, with a sigh, 'let me explain the details of this dismal business
to you on Monday. I have hardly the courage for it now.'

The curtain dropped