dy to laugh as to preach,
and into whose ardent soul nature had infused a saving sense of the
whimsical in life and character, cynicism and vanity seemed to have no
case. Robert's quick temper had been wonderfully disciplined by life
since his Oxford days. He had now very little of that stiff-neckedness,
so fatal to the average reformer, which makes a man insist on all or
nothing from his followers. He took what each man had to give. Nay, he
made it almost seem as though the grudging support of Lestrange, or the
critical half-patronizing approval of the young barrister from the West
who came down to listen to him, and made a favor of teaching in his
night-school, were as precious to him as was the wholehearted, the
self-abandoning veneration, which the majority of those about him had
begun to show toward the man in whom, as Charles Richards said, they had
'seen God.'

At last by the middle of November the whole great building, with the
exception of the top floor, was cleared and ready for use. Robert felt
the same joy in it, in it's clean paint, the half-filled shelves in the
library, the pictures standing against the walls ready to be hung, the
rolls of bright-colored matting ready to be laid down, as he had felt
in the Murewell Institute. He and Flaxman, helped by a voluntary army
of men, worked at it from morning till night. Only Catherine could ever
persuade him to remember that he was not yet physically himself.

Then came the day when the building was formally opened, when the gilt
letters over the door, 'The New Brotherhood of Christ,' shone out into
the dingy street, and when the first enrolment of names in the book of
the Brotherhood took place.

For two hours a continuous stream of human beings surrounded the little
table beside which Elsmere stood, inscribing their names, and receiving
from him the silver badge, bearing the head of Christ, which was to be
the outward and conspicuous sign of membership. Men came of all sorts:
the intelligent well-paid artisan, the pallid clerk or small accountant,
stalwart warehouse men, huge carters and dray-men, the boy attached to
each by the laws of the profession often straggling lumpishly behind his
master. Women were there: wives who came because their lords came, or
because Mr. Elsmere had been 'that good' to them that anything they
could do to oblige him 'they would, and welcome;' prim pupil-teachers,
holding themselves with straight superior shoulders; children, wh