young man'll be good to _him_. The Squire will make
friends with him, and Mr. Elsmere will have a good wife--and
there'll be children born to him--and the Squire will take an
interest--and--and--maybe----"

The old man paused. Robert grasped his hand silently.

'And there was something in the way between you,' the speaker went on,
starting. 'I dare say you were quite right--quite right. I can't judge.
Only there are ways of doing a thing. And it was a last chance; and now
it's missed--it's missed. Ah! It's no good talking; he has a heart--he
has! Many's the kind thing he's done in old days for me and mine--I'll
never forget them! But all these last few years--oh, I know, I know. You
can't go and shut your heart up, and fly in the face of all the duties
the Lord laid on you, without losing yourself and setting the Lord
against you. But it is pitiful, Mr. Elsmere, it's pitiful!'

It seemed to Robert suddenly as though there was a Divine breath passing
through the wintry, lane and through the shaking voice of the old man.
Beside the spirit looking out of those wrinkled eyes, his own hot youth,
its justest resentments, its most righteous angers, seemed crude, harsh,
inexcusable.

'Thank you, Meyrick, thank you, and God bless you! Don't imagine I will
forget a word you have said to me.'

The Rector shook the hand he held warmly twice over, a gentle smile
passed over Meyrick's aging face, and they parted.

That night it fell to Robert to sit up after midnight with John Allwood,
the youth of twenty whose case had been a severer tax on the powers of
the little nursing staff than perhaps any other. Mother and neighbors
were worn out, and it was difficult to spare a hospital nurse for long
together from the diphtheria cases. Robert, therefore, had insisted
during the preceding week on taking alternate nights with one of the
nurses. During the first hours before midnight he slept soundly on a
bed made up in the ground-floor room of the little sanatorium. Then at
twelve the nurse called him, and he went out, his eyes still heavy with
sleep, into a still, frosty winter's night.

After so much rain, so much restlessness of wind and cloud, the silence
and the starry calm of it were infinitely welcome. The sharp cold air
cleared his brain and braced his nerves, and by the time he reached the
cottage whither he was bound, he was broad awake. He opened the door
softly, passed through the lower room, crowded with sleeping children,