climbed the narrow stairs as noiselessly as possible, and found himself
in a garret, faintly lit, a bed in one corner, and a woman sitting
beside it. The woman glided away, the Rector looked carefully at the
table of instructions hanging over the bed, assured himself that wine
and milk and beef essence and medicines were ready to his hand, put
out his watch on the wooden table near the bed, and sat him down to his
task. The boy was sleeping the sleep of weakness. Food was to be given
every half hour, and in this perpetual impulse to the system lay his
only chance.

The Rector had his Greek Testament with him, and could just read it by
the help of the dim light. But after a while, as the still hours passed
on, it dropped on to his knee, and he sat thinking--endlessly thinking.
The young laborer lay motionless beside him, the lines of the long
emaciated frame showing through the bedclothes. The night-light
flickered on the broken, discolored ceiling; every now and then a mouse
scratched in the plaster; the mother's heavy breathing came from the
next room; sometimes a dog barked or an owl cried outside. Otherwise
deep silence, such silence as drives the soul back upon itself.

Elsmere was conscious of a strange sense of moral expansion. The stern
judgments, the passionate condemnations which his nature housed so
painfully, seemed lifted from it. The soul breathed an 'ampler aether,
a diviner air.' Oh! the mysteries of life and character, the subtle,
inexhaustible claims of pity! The problems which hang upon our being
here; its mixture of elements; the pressure of its inexorable physical
environment; the relations of mind to body, of man's poor will to this
tangled tyrannous life--it was along these old, old lines his thought
went painfully groping and always at intervals it came back to the
Squire, pondering, seeking to understand, a new soberness, a new
humility and patience entering in.

And yet it was not Meyrick's facts exactly that had brought this about.
Robert thought them imperfect, only half true. Rather was it the spirit
of love, of infinite forbearance in which the simpler, duller nature had
declared itself that had appealed to him, nay, reproached him.

Then these thoughts led him on further and further from man to God, from
human defect to the Eternal Perfectness. Never once during those hours
did Elsmere's hand fail to perform its needed service to the faint
sleeper beside him, and yet that night was one