wn door. As he closed it behind him, Catherine
came out into the pretty old hall from the dining-room.

'Robert, have you walked all the way?'

'Yes. I came along the Embankment. Such a beautiful evening!'

He slipped his arm inside hers, and they mounted the stairs together.
She glanced at him wistfully. She was perfectly aware that these months
were to him months of incessant travail of spirit, and she caught at
this moment the old strenuous look of eye and brow she knew so well.
A year ago, and every thought of his mind had been open to her--and
now--she herself had shut them out--but her heart sank within her.

She turned and kissed him. He bent his head fondly over her. But
inwardly all the ardor of his mood collapsed at the touch of her.
For the protest of a world in arms can be withstood with joy, but the
protest that steals into your heart, that takes love's garb and uses
love's ways--_there_ is the difficulty!

CHAPTER XXXIII.

But Robert was some time in finding his opening, in realizing any
fraction of his dream. At first he tried work under the Broad
Church Vicar to whom Grey had introduced him. He undertook some
rent-collecting, and some evening lectures on elementary science to
boys and men. But after a while he began to feel his position false and
unsatisfactory. In truth, his opinions were in the main identical with
those of the Vicar under whom he was acting. But Mr. Vernon was a
Broad Churchman, belonged to the Church Reform movement, and thought it
absolutely necessary to 'keep things going,' and by a policy of prudent
silence and gradual expansion from within, to save the great 'plant'
of the Establishment from falling wholesale into the hands of the High
Churchmen. In consequence, he was involved, as Robert held, in endless
contradictions and practical falsities of speech and action. His large
church was attended by a handful of some fifty to a hundred persons.
Vernon could not preach what he did believe, and would not preach, more
than what was absolutely necessary, what he did not believe. He was
hard-working and kind-hearted, but the perpetual divorce between thought
and action, which his position made inevitable, was constantly blunting
and weakening all he did. His whole life, indeed, was one long waste of
power, simply for lack of an elementary frankness.

But if these became Robert's views as to Vernon, Vernon's feeling toward
Elsmere after six weeks' acquaintance was not less deci