as being ridiculously coddled, and that
Wardlaw was much more in want of a holiday than he, was carried off
to the Embankment, and the two spent a happy hour wandering westward,
Somerset House, the bridges, the Westminster towers rising before them
into the haze of the June afternoon. A little fresh breeze came off the
river; that, or his wife's hand on his arm, seemed to put new life into
Elsmere. And she walked beside him, talking frankly, heart to heart,
with flashes of her old sweet gayety, as she had not talked for months.

Deep in her mystical sense all the time lay the belief in a final
restoration, in an all-atoning moment, perhaps at the very end of life,
in which the blind would see, the doubter be convinced. And, meanwhile,
the blessedness of this peace, this surrender! Surely the air this
afternoon was pure and life-giving for them, the bells rang for them,
the trees were green for them!

He had need in the week that followed of all that she had given back to
him. For Mr. Grey's illness had taken a dangerous and alarming turn. It
seemed to be the issue of long ill-health, and the doctors feared that
there were no resources of constitution left to carry him through it.
Every day some old St. Anselm's friend on the spot wrote to Elsmere,
and with each post the news grew more despairing. Since Elsmere had left
Oxford, he could count on the fingers of one hand the occasions on which
he and Grey had met face to face. But for him, as for many another man
of our time, Henry Grey's influence was not primarily an influence of
personal contact. His mere life, that he was there, on English soil,
within a measurable distance, had been to Elsmere in his darkest moments
one of his thoughts of refuge. At a time when a religion which can no
longer be believed clashes with a scepticism full of danger to conduct,
every such witness as Grey to the power of a new and coming truth holds
a special place in the hearts of men who can neither accept fairy tales,
nor reconcile themselves to a world without faith. The saintly life
grows to be a beacon, a witness. Men cling to it as they have always
clung to each other, to the visible, and the tangible; as the elders of
Miletus, though the Way lay before them, clung to the man who had set
their feet therein, 'sorrowing most of all that they should see his face
no more.'

The accounts grew worse--all friends shut out, no possibility of last
words--the whole of Oxford moved and sorro