ether, and what Robert's nobility and beauty of character
would never have won him, though he had worn himself to death in the
service of the poor and the tormented under the Squire's eyes, a chance
coincidence of intellectual interest had won him almost in a moment.

The Squire walked back to the house under a threatening sky, his
mackintosh cloak wrapped about him, his arms folded, his mind full of an
unwonted excitement.

The sentiment of long-past days--days in Berlin, in Paris, where
conversations such as that he had just passed through were the daily
relief and reward of labor, was stirring in him. Occasionally he had
endeavored to import the materials for them from the Continent, from
London. But as a matter of fact, it was years since he had had any
such talk as this with an Englishman on English ground, and he suddenly
realized that he had been unwholesomely solitary, and that for
the scholar there is no nerve stimulus like that of an occasional
interchange of ideas with some one acquainted with his _Fach_.

'Who would ever have thought of discovering instincts and aptitudes
of such a kind in this long-legged optimist?' The Squire shrugged his
shoulders as he thought of the attempt involved in such a personality
to combine both worlds, the world of action and the world of thought.
Absurd! Of course, ultimately one or other must go to the wall.

Meanwhile, what a ludicrous waste of time and opportunity that he and
this man should have been at cross-purposes like this! 'Why the deuce
couldn't he have given some rational account of himself to begin with!'
thought the Squire irritably, forgetting, of course, who it was that had
wholly denied him the opportunity. 'And then the sending back of those
books: what a piece of idiocy!'

Granted an historical taste in this young parson, it was a curious
chance, Mr. Wendover reflected, that in his choice of a subject he
should just have fallen on the period of the later Empire--of the
passage from the old-world to the new, where the Squire was a master.
The Squire fell to thinking of the kind of knowledge implied in his
remarks, of the stage he seemed to have reached, and then to cogitating
as to the books he must be now in want of. He went back to his library,
ran over the shelves, picking out volumes here and there with an
unwonted glow and interest all the while. He sent for a case, and made
a youth who sometimes acted as his secretary pack them. And still as he
wen