wcome?' he cried despairingly. 'Let me say
nothing, dear old friend! I am tired out; so, I expect, are you. I know
what this week has been to you. Walk with me a little. Leave these great
things alone. We cannot agree. Be content--God knows! Tell me about the
old place, and the people. I long for news of them.'

A sort of shudder passed through his companion. Newcome stood wrestling
with himself. It was like the slow departure of a possessing force. Then
he sombrely assented, and they turned toward the City. But his answers,
as Robert questioned him, were sharp and mechanical and presently it
became evident that the demands of the ordinary talk to which Elsmere
vigorously held him were more than he could bear.

As they reached St. Paul's, towering into the watery moon-light of the
clouded sky, he stopped abruptly and said good-night.

You came to me in the spirit of war,' said Robert, with some emotion, as
he held his hand; 'give me instead the grasp of peace!'

The spell of his manner, his presence, prevailed at last. A quivering
smile dawned on the priest's delicate lip.

'God bless you--God restore you!' he said sadly, and was gone.

CHAPTER XLI.

A week later Elsmere was startled to find himself detained, after his
story-telling, by a trio of workmen, asking on behalf of some thirty or
forty members of the North R---- Club that he would give them a course
of lectures on the New Testament. One of them was the gas-fitter Charles
Richards; another was the watchmaker Lestrange, who had originally
challenged Robert to deliver himself; and the third was a tough old
Scotchman of sixty with a philosophical turn, under whose spoutings of
Hume and Locke, of Reid and Dugald Stewart, delivered in the shrillest
of cracked voices, the Club had writhed many an impatient half-hour on
debating nights. He had an unexpected artistic gift, a kind of 'sport'
as compared with the rest of his character, which made him a valued
designer in the pottery works; but his real interests were speculative
and argumentative, concerned with 'common nawtions of the praimary
elements of reason,' and the appearance of Robert in the district seemed
to offer him at last a foeman worthy of his steel. Elsmere shrewdly
suspected that the last two looked forward to any teaching he might give
mostly as a new and favorable exercising ground for their own wits
but he took the risk, gladly accepted the invitation, and fixed Sunday
afternoons for a wee