rip which made him feel at once
infinitely more at home with him at this moment than he had felt with
the old friend of his undergraduate years.

They walked down Beaumont Street together. The rain came on again, and
the long black crowd stretched before them was lashed by the driving
gusts. As they went along, Cathcart told him all he wanted to know.

'The night before the end he was perfectly calm and conscious. I
told you he mentioned your name among the friends to whom he sent his
good-by. He thought for everybody. For all those of his house he left
the most minute and tender directions. He forgot nothing. And all with
such extraordinary simplicity and quietness, like one arranging for a
journey! In the evening an old Quaker aunt of his, a North-country woman
whom he had been much with as a boy, and to whom he was much attached,
was sitting with him. I was there too. She was a beautiful old figure in
her white cap and kerchief, and it seemed to please him to lie and
look at her. "It'll not be for long, Henry," she said to him once "I'm
seventy-seven this spring. I shall come to you soon." He made no reply,
and his silence seemed to disturb her. I don't fancy she had known much
of his mind of late years. "You'll not be doubting the Lord's goodness,
Henry?" she said to him, with the tears in her eyes. "No,", he said,
"no, never. Only it seems to be His Will we should be certain of
nothing--_but Himself!_ I ask no more." I shall never forget the accent
of those words: they were the breath of his inmost life. If ever man was
_Gottbetrunken_ it was he--and yet not a word beyond what he felt to be
true, beyond what the intellect could grasp!'

Twenty minutes later Robert stood by the open grave. The rain beat down
on the black concourse of mourners. But there were blue spaces in the
drifting sky, and a wavering rainy light played at intervals over the
Wytham and Hinksey Hills, and over the butter-cupped river meadows,
where the lush hay-grass bent in long lines under the showers. To his
left, the Provost, his glistening white head bare to the rain, was
reading the rest of the service.

As the coffin was lowered Elsmere bent over the grave. 'My friend, my
master,' cried the yearning filial heart, 'oh, give me something of
yourself to take back into life, something to brace me through this
darkness of our ignorance, something to keep hope alive as you kept it
to the end!'

And on the inward ear there rose, with the sol