nding, growing under it. _Bien!_ sooner he than! To be fair,
however, let me remember that she decidedly does not like me--which
may cut me off from Elsmere. However'--and Langham sighed over his
fire--'what have he and I to do with one another in the future? By
all the laws of character something untoward might come out of this
marriage. But she will mould him, rather than he her. Besides, she will
have children--and that solves most things.'

Meanwhile, if Langham dissected the bride as he dissected most people,
Robert, with that keen observation which lay hidden somewhere under
his careless boyish ways, noticed many points of change about his old
friend. Langham seemed to him less human, more strange than ever; the
points of contact between him and active life were lessening in number
term by term. He lectured only so far as was absolutely necessary for
the retention of his post, and he spoke with whole-sale distaste of his
pupils. He had set up a book on 'The Schools of Athens,' but when Robert
saw the piles of disconnected notes already accumulated, he perfectly
understood that the book was a mere blind, a screen, behind which a
difficult, fastidious nature trifled and procrastinated as it pleased.

Again, when Elsmere was an undergraduate Langham and Grey had been
intimate. Now, Laugham's tone _a propos_ of Grey's politics and Grey's
dreams of Church Reform was as languidly sarcastic as it was with regard
to most of the strenuous things of life. 'Nothing particular is true,'
his manner said, 'and all action is a degrading _pis-aller_. Get through
the day somehow, with as little harm to yourself and other people as
may be; do your duty if you like it, but, for heaven's sake, don't cant
about it to other people!'

If the affinities of character count for much, Catherine and Henry Grey
should certainly have understood each other. The tutor liked the look
of Elsmere's wife. His kindly brown eyes rested on her with pleasure; he
tried in his shy but friendly way to get at her, and there was in both
of them a touch of homeliness, a sheer power of unworldiness that should
have drawn them together. And indeed Catherine felt the charm, the spell
of this born leader of men. But she watched him with a sort of troubled
admiration, puzzled, evidently, by the halo of moral dignity surrounding
him, which contended with something else in her mind respecting him.
Some words of Robert's, uttered very early in their acquaintance, ha