lsmere. At
the same time he was crossed and complicated by all sorts of fastidious
conservative fibres, and when his friends talked rationalism, it
often gave him a vehement pleasure to maintain that a good Catholic or
Ritualist service was worth all their arguments, and would outlast them.
His taste drew him to the Church, so did a love of opposition to current
'isms.' Bishops counted on him for subscriptions, and High Church
divines sent him their pamphlets. He never refused the subscriptions,
but it should be added that with equal regularity _he_ dropped
the pamphlets into his waste-paper basket. Altogether a not very
decipherable person in religious matters--as Rose had already
discovered.

The change from the dim and perfumed spaces of St. Wilfrid's to the bare
warehouse room with its packed rows of listeners was striking enough.
Here were no bowed figures, no _recueillement_. In the blaze of crude
light every eager eye was fixed upon the slight elastic figure on the
platform, each change in the expressive face, each gesture of the long
arms and thin flexible hands, finding its response in the laughter, the
attentive silence, the frowning suspense of the audience. At one point a
band of young roughs at the back made a disturbance, but their neighbors
had the offenders quelled and out in a twinkling, and the room cried out
for a repetition of the sentences which had been lost in the noise. When
Dantes, opening his knife with his teeth, managed to out the strings
of the sack, a gasp of relief ran through the crowd; when at last he
reached _terra firma_ there was a ringing cheer.

'What is he, d'ye know?' Flaxman heard a mechanic ask his neighbor, as
Robert paused for a moment to get breath, the man jerking a grimy thumb
in the story-teller's direction meanwhile. 'Seems like a parson somehow.
But he ain't a parson.'

'Not he,' said the other laconically. 'Knows better. Most of 'em as
comes down 'ere stuffs all they have to say as full of goody-goody as
an egg's full of meat. If he wur that sort you wouldn't catch _me_ here.
Never heard him say anything in the "dear brethren" sort of style, and
I've been 'ere most o' these evenings and to his lectures besides.'

'Perhaps he's one of your d--d sly ones,' said the first speaker
dubiously. 'Means to shovel it in by-and-by.'

'Well, I don't know as I couldn't stand it if he did,' returned his
companion. 'He'd let other fellows have their say, anyhow.'

Flaxman looke