erhaps it was his scientific work, fragmentary as it was that was
really quickening and sharpening these historical impressions of his.
Evolution--once a mere germ in the mind--was beginning to press, to
encroach, to intermeddle with the mind's other furniture.

And the comparative instinct--that tool, _par excellence_, of modern
science was at last fully awake, was growing fast, taking hold, now
here, now there.

'It is tolerably clear to me,' he said to himself suddenly one winter
afternoon, as he was trudging home alone from Mile End, 'that some day
or other I must set to work to bring a little order into one's notions
of the Old Testament. At present they are just a chaos!'

He walked on awhile, struggling with the rainstorm which had overtaken
him, till again the mind's quick life took voice.

'But what matter? God in the beginning--God in the prophets--in Israel's
best life--God in Christ! How are any theories about the Pentateuch to
touch that?'

And into the clear eyes, the young face aglow with wind and rain, there
leapt a light, a softness indescribable.

But the vivider and the keener grew this new mental life of Elsmere's,
the more constant became his sense of soreness as to that foolish and
motiveless quarrel which divided him from the Squire. Naturally he was
for ever being harassed and pulled up in his work by the mere loss of
the Murewell library. To have such a collection so close, and to be
cut off from it, was a state of things no student could help feeling
severely. But it was much more than that: it was the man he hankered
after; the man who was a master where he was a beginner; the man who had
given his life to learning, and was carrying all his vast accumulations
sombrely to the grave, unused, untransmitted.

'He might have given me his knowledge,' thought Elsmere sadly, 'and
I--I--would have been a son to him. Why is life so perverse?'

Meanwhile he was as much cut off from the great house and its master as
though both had been surrounded by the thorn hedge of fairy tale. The
Hall had its visitors during these winter months, but the Elsmeres saw
nothing of them. Robert gulped down a natural sigh when one Saturday
evening, as he passed the Hall gates, he saw driving through them the
chief of English science side by side with the most accomplished of
English critics.

"'There are good times in the world and I ain't in 'em!'" he said
to himself with a laugh and a shrug as he turned up the