dden burst of cheering. Lady Charlotte
pressed forward to him through the crowd, offering to take him home.
'Come with us, Mr. Elsmere; you look like a ghost.' But he shook his
head, smiling. No, thank you, Lady Charlotte--I must have some air,' and
he took her out on his arm, while Flaxman followed with Rose.

It once occurred to Flaxman to look round for the priest he had seen
come in. But there were no signs of him. 'I had an idea he would have
spoken,' he thought. Just as Well perhaps. We should have had a row.'

Lady Charlotte threw herself back in the carriage as they drove off,
with a long breath, and the inward reflection, 'So his wife wouldn't
come and hear him! Must be a woman with a character, that--a Strafford
in petticoats!'

Robert turned up the street to the City, the tall slight figure
seeming to shrink together as he walked. After his passionate effort,
indescribable depression had overtaken him.

'Words-words!' he said to himself, striking out his hands in a kind of
feverish protest, as he strode along, against his own powerlessness,
against that weight of the present and the actual which seems to the
enthusiast alternately light as air, or heavy as the mass of AEtna on the
breast of Enceladus.

Suddenly, at the corner of a street, a man's figure in a long black robe
stopped him and laid a hand on his arm.

'Newcome!' cried Robert, standing still.

'I was there,' said the other, bending forward and looking close into
his eyes. 'I heard almost all. I went to confront, to denounce you!'

By the light of a lamp not far off Robert caught the attenuated
whiteness and sharpness of the well-known face, to which weeks
of fasting and mystical excitement had given a kind of unearthly
remoteness. He gathered himself together with an inward groan. He felt
as though there were no force in him at that moment wherewith to meet
reproaches, to beat down fanaticism. The pressure on nerve and strength
seemed unbearable.

Newcome, watching him with eagle eye, saw the sudden shrinking and
hesitation. He had often in old days felt the same sense of power over
the man who yet, in what seemed his weakness, had always escaped him in
the end.

'I went to denounce,' he continued, in a strange, tense voice; 'and the
Lord refused it to me. He kept me watching for you here--these words are
not mine I speak. I waited patiently in that room till the Lord should
deliver His enemy into my hand. My wrath was hot against th