ervice before him, he was able to throw himself into such a
hors-d'oeuvre as this. He was reading to night one of the most perfect
scenes that even the Wizard of the North has ever conjured: the scene in
the tent of Richard Lion-Heart, when the disguised slave saves the life
of the king, and Richard first suspects his identity. As he read on,
his arms resting on the high desk in front of him, and his eyes, full
of infectious enjoyment, travelling from the book to his audience,
surrounded by human beings whose confidence he had won, and whose lives
he was brightening from day to day, he seemed to Langham the very type
and model of a man who had found his _metier_, found his niche in the
world, and the best means of filling it. If to attain to an 'adequate
and masterly expression of oneself' be the aim of life, Robert was
achieving it. This parish of twelve hundred souls gave him now all the
scope he asked. It was evident that he felt his work to be rather above
than below his deserts. He was content--more than content to spend
ability which would have distinguished him in public life, or carried
him far to the front in literature, on the civilizing a few hundred
of England's rural poor. The future might bring him worldly
success--Langham thought it must and would. Clergymen of Robert's stamp
are rare among us. But if so, it would be in response to no conscious
effort of his. Here, in the country living he had so long dreaded and
put from him, less it should tax his young energies too lightly, he was
happy--deeply, abundantly happy, at peace with God, at one with man.

_Happy!_ Langham, sitting at the outer corner of one of the benches,
by the open door, gradually ceased to listen, started on other lines of
thought by this realization, warm, stimulating, provocative, of another
man's happiness.

Outside, the shadows lengthened across the green; groups of distant
children or animals passed in and out of the golden light spaces; the
patches of heather left here and here glowed as the sunset touched them.
Every now and then his eye travelled vaguely past a cottage garden, gay
with the pinks and carmines of the phloxes, into the cool browns and
bluish-grays of the raftered room beyond; babies toddled across the
road, with stooping mothers in their train; the whole air and scene
seemed to be suffused with suggestions of the pathetic expansiveness and
helplessness of human existence, which generation after generation, is
still