the treasures in it before he tore
himself away to pay his morning visit to Mile End. There everything was
improving; the poor Sharland child indeed had slipped away on the night
after the Squire's visit, but the other bad cases in the diphtheria ward
were mending fast. John Allwood was gaining strength daily, and poor
Mary Sharland was feebly struggling back to a life which seemed hardly
worth so much effort to keep. Robert felt, with a welcome sense of
slackening strain, that the daily and hourly superintendence which he
and Catherine had been giving to the place might lawfully be relaxed,
that the nurses on the spot were now more than equal to their task, and
after having made his round he raced home again in order to secure an
hour with his books before luncheon.

The following day a note arrived, while they were at luncheon in the
Squire's angular precise handwriting. It contained a request that,
unless otherwise engaged, the Rector would walk with Mr. Wendover that
afternoon.

Robert flung it across to Catherine.

'Let me see,' he said, deliberating, 'have I any engagement I must
keep?'

There was a sort of jealousy for his work within him contending with
this new fascination of the Squire's company. But, honestly, there was
nothing in the way, and he went.

That walk was the first of many. The Squire had no sooner convinced
himself that young Elsmere's society did in reality provide him with
a stimulus and recreation he had been too long without, than in his
imperious wilful way he began to possess himself of it as much as
possible. He never alluded to the trivial matters which had first
separated and then united them. He worked the better, he thought the
more clearly, for these talks and walks with Elsmere, and therefore
these talks and walks became an object with him. They supplied a
long-stifled want, the scholar's want of disciples, of some form
of investment for all that heaped-up capital of thought he had been
accumulating during a life-time.

As for Robert, he soon felt himself so much under the spell of the
Squire's strange and powerful personality that he was forced to make a
fight for it, lest this new claim should encroach upon the old one.
He would walk when the Squire liked, but three times out of four these
walks must be parish rounds, interrupted by descents into cottages and
chats in farmhouse parlors. The Squire submitted. The neighborhood began
to wonder over the strange spectacle of Mr.