the Church!' he said--'it is impossible. You
will only wear yourself out in efforts to restrain what you could do
infinitely more good, as things stand now, by pouring out. Come to
us!--I will put you in the way. You shall be hampered by no pledges of
any sort. Come and take the direction of some of my workers. We have all
got our hands more than full. Your knowledge, your experience, would be
invaluable. There is no other opening like it in England just now for
men of your way of thinking and mine. Come! Who knows what we may be
putting our Hands to--what fruit may grow from the smallest seed?'

The two men stopped beside the lightly frozen water. Robert gathered
that in this soul, too, there had risen the same large intoxicating
dream of a recognized Christendom, a new wide-spreading, shelter of
faith for discouraged, brow-beaten man, as in his own. 'I will!' he said
briefly, after a pause, his own look kindling--'it is the opening I
have been pining for. I will give you all I can, and bless you for the
chance.'

That evening Robert got home late after a busy day full of various
engagements. Mary, after some waiting up for 'Fader,' had just been
carried protesting, red lips pouting, and fat legs kicking, off to
bed. Catherine was straightening the room, which had been thrown into
confusion by the child's romps.

It was with an effort--for he knew it would be a shock to her--that he
began to talk to her about the breakfast-party at Mr. Flaxman's, and
his talk with Murray Edwardes. But he had made it a rule with himself to
tell her everything that he was doing or meant to do. She would not let
him tell her what he was thinking. But as much openness as there could
be between them, there should be.

Catherine listened--still moving about the while--the thin beautiful
lips becoming more and more compressed. Yes, it was hard to her,
very hard; the people among whom she had been brought up, her father
especially, would have held out the hand of fellowship to any body of
Christian people, but not to the Unitarian. No real barrier of feeling
divided them from any orthodox Dissenter, but the gulf between them
and the Unitarian had been dug very deep by various forces--forces of
thought originally, of strong habit and prejudice in the course of time.

'He is going to work with them now,' she thought bitterly; 'soon he will
be one of them--perhaps a Unitarian minister himself.'

And for the life of her, as he told his tal