f that month all but the top floor, the tenant of which
refused to be dislodged, fell into Elsmere's hands.

Meanwhile at a meeting held every Sunday after lecture--a meeting
composed mainly of artisans of the district, but including also Robert's
helpers from the West, and a small sprinkling of persons interested in
the man and his work from all parts--the details of 'The New Brotherhood
of Christ' were being hammered out. Catherine was generally present,
sitting a little apart, with a look which Flaxman, who now knew her
well, was always trying to decipher afresh--a sort of sweet aloofness,
as though the spirit behind it saw down the vistas of the future,
ends and solutions which gave it courage to endure the present. Murray
Edwardes too was always there. It often struck Flaxman afterward that in
Robert's attitude toward Edwardes at this time, in his constant desire
to bring him forward, to associate him with himself as much as possible
in the government and formation of the infant society, there was a
half-conscious prescience of a truth that as yet none knew, not even the
tender wife, the watchful friend.

The meetings were of extraordinary interest. The men, the great majority
of whom had been disciplined and moulded for months by contact with
Elsmere's teaching and Elsmere's thought, showed a responsiveness, a
receptivity, even a power of initiation which often struck Flaxman with
wonder. Were these the men he had seen in the Club-hall on the night
of Robert's address--sour, stolid, brutalized, hostile to all things in
heaven and earth?

'And we go on prating that the age of saints is over, the role of the
individual lessening day by day! Fool! go and be a saint, go and give
yourself to ideas; go and _live_ the life hid with Christ in God, and
see,'--so would run the quick comment of the observer.

But incessant as was the reciprocity, the interchange and play of
feeling between Robert and the wide following growing up around him,
it was plain to Flaxman that although he never moved a step without
carrying his world with him, he was never at the mercy of his world.
Nothing was ever really left to chance. Through all these strange
debates, which began rawly and clumsily enough, and grew every week more
and more absorbing to all concerned, Flaxman was convinced that hardly
any rule or formula of the new society was ultimately adopted which had
not been for long in Robert's mind--thought out and brought into final