trifles, and Robert was soon painfully conscious that
the old sympathetic bond between them no longer existed. Presently,
Langham, as though with an effort to remember, asked after Catherine,
then inquired what he was doing in the way of writing, and neither
of them mentioned the name of Leyburn. They left the table and sat
spasmodically talking, in reality expectant. And at last the sound
present already in both minds made itself heard--the first long solitary
stroke of the chapel bell.

Robert covered his eyes.

'Do you remember in this room, Langham, you introduced us first?'

'I remember,' replied the other abruptly. Then, with a half-cynical,
half-melancholy scrutiny of his companion, he said, after a pause, 'What
a faculty of hero-worship you have always had, Elsmere!'

'Do you know anything of the end?' Robert asked him presently, as
that tolling bell seemed to bring the strong feeling beneath more
irresistibly to the surface.

'No, I never asked!' cried Langham, with sudden harsh animation. 'What
purpose could be served? Death should be avoided by the living. We have
no business with it. Do what we will, we cannot rehearse our own parts.
And the sight of other men's performances helps us no more than the
sight of a great actor gives the dramatic gift. All they do for us is to
imperil the little nerve, break through the little calm, we have left.'

Elsmere's hand dropped, and he turned round to him with a flashing
smile.

'Ah--I know it now--you loved him still.'

Langham, who was standing, looked down on him sombrely, yet more
indulgently.

'How much you always made of feeling' he said after a little pause, 'in
a world where, according to me, our chief object should be not to feel!'

Then he began to hunt for his cap and gown. In another minute the two
made part of the crowd in the front quadrangle, where the rain was
sprinkling, and the insistent grief-laden voice of the bell rolled, from
pause to pause, above the gowned figures, spreading thence in wide waves
of mourning sound over Oxford.

The chapel service passed over Robert like a solemn pathetic dream. The
lines of undergraduate faces the Provost's white head, the voice of the
chaplain reading, the full male unison of the voices replying--how they
carried him back to the day when as a lad from school he had sat on one
of the chancel benches beside his mother, listening for the first time
to the subtle simplicity, if one may be allowed the par