ound it, and confronted his visitor with a look of
surprised annoyance. The figure of the Rector, tall, thin, and youthful,
stood out against the delicate browns and whites of the book-lined
walls. The great room, so impressively bare when Robert and Langham
had last seen it, was now full of the signs of a busy man's constant
habitation. An odor of smoke pervaded it; the table in the window was
piled with books just unpacked, and the half-emptied case from which
they had been taken lay on the ground beside the Squire's chair.

'I persuaded Vincent to admit me, Mr. Wendover,' said Robert, advancing
hat in hand, while the Squire hastily put down the German professor's
pipe he had just been enjoying, and coldly accepted his proffered
greeting. 'I should have preferred not to disturb you without an
appointment, but after your letter it seemed to me some prompt personal
explanation was necessary.'

The Squire stiffly motioned toward a chair, which Robert took, and then
slipped back into his own, his wrinkled eyes fixed on the intruder.

Robert, conscious of almost intolerable embarrassment, but maintaining
in spite of it an excellent degree of self-control, plunged at once into
business. He took the letter he had just received from the Squire as a
text, made a good-humored defence of his own proceedings, described his
attempt to move Henslowe, and the reluctance of his appeal from the man
to the master. The few things he allowed himself to say about Henslowe
were in perfect temper, though by no means without an edge.

Then having disposed of the more personal aspects of the matter, he
paused, and looked hesitatingly at the face opposite him, more like
a bronzed mask at this moment than a human countenance. The Squire,
however, gave him no help. He had received his remarks so far in perfect
silence, and seeing that there were more to come, he waited for them
with the same rigidity of look and attitude.

So, after a moment or two, Robert went on to describe in detail some of
those individual cases of hardship and disease at Mile End, during
the preceding year, which could be most clearly laid to the sanitary
condition of the place. Filth, damp, leaking roofs, foul floors,
poisoned water--he traced to each some ghastly human ill, telling his
stories with a nervous brevity, a suppressed fire, which would have
burnt them into the sense of almost any other listener. Not one of these
woes but he and Catherine had tended with si