to which the
modern world owes obligations it can never repay. You are rooted deep
in the past; you have also a future of infinite expansiveness stretching
before you. Among European nations at this moment you alone have freedom
in the true sense, you alone have religion. I would give a year of life
to know what you will have made of your freedom and your religion two
hundred years hence!'

As Robert recalled the words, the Abbey lay before him, wrapped in the
bluish haze of the winter afternoon. Only the towers rose out of the
mist, gray and black against the red bands of cloud. A pair of pigeons
circled round them, as careless and free in flight as though they were
alone with the towers and the sunset. Below, the streets were full of
people; the omnibuses rolled to and fro; the lamps were just lit; lines
of straggling figures, dark in the half light, were crossing the street
here and there. And to all the human rush and swirl below, the quiet of
the Abbey and the infinite red distances of sky gave a peculiar pathos
and significance.

Robert filled his eye and sense, and then walked quickly away toward the
Embankment. Carrying the poetry and grandeur of England's past with him,
he turned his face east-ward to the great new-made London on the other
side of St. Paul's, the London of the democracy, of the nineteenth
century, and of the future. He was wrestling with himself, a prey to one
of those critical moments of life, when circumstance seems once more to
restore to us the power of choice, of distributing a Yes or a No among
the great solicitations which meet the human spirit on its path from
silence to silence. The thought of his friend's reverence, and of his
own personal debt toward the country to whose long travail of centuries
he owed all his own joys and faculties, was hot within him.

Here and here did England help me--how can I help England,--say!

Ah! that vast chaotic London south and east of the great church! He
already knew something of it. A Liberal clergyman there, settled in the
very blackest, busiest heart of it, had already made him welcome on Mr.
Grey's introduction. He had gone with this good man on several occasions
through some little fraction of that teeming world, now so hidden and
peaceful between the murky river mists and the cleaner light-filled rays
of the sky. He had heard much, and pondered a good deal, the quick mind
caught at once by the differences, some tragic, some merely curious