contemplate with patience the
loss--not of friends or happiness, but of his best self? What shall it
profit a man, indeed, if he gain the whole world--the whole world of
knowledge, and speculation,--and _lose his own soul_?

And then, for his endless comfort, there rose on the inward eye the
vision of an Oxford lecture room, of a short, sturdy figure, of a great
brow over honest eyes, of words alive with moral passion, of thought
instinct with the beauty of holiness. Thank God for the saint in Henry
Grey! Thinking of it, Robert felt his own self-respect re-born.

Oh! to see Grey in the flesh, to get his advice, his approval! Even
though it was the depth of vacation, Grey was so closely connected with
the town, as distinguished from the university, life of Oxford, it might
be quite possible to find him at home. Elsmere suddenly determined to
find out at once if he could be seen.

And if so, he would go over to Oxford at once. _This_ should be the
next step, and he would say nothing to Catherine till afterward. He felt
himself so dull, so weary, so resourceless. Grey should help and counsel
him, should send him back with a clearer brain--a quicker ingenuity of
love, better furnished against her pain and his own.

Then everything else was forgotten; and he thought of nothing but that
grisly moment of waiting in the empty room, when still believing it
night, he had put out his hand for his wife, and with a superstitious
pang had found himself alone. His heart torn with a hundred inarticulate
cries of memory and grief, he sat on beside the water, unconscious
of the passing of time, his gray eyes staring sightlessly at the
wood-pigeons as they flew past him, at the occasional flash of a
kingfisher, at the moving panorama of summer clouds above the trees
opposite.

At last he was startled back to consciousness by the fall of a few heavy
drops of warm rain. He looked at his watch. It was nearly four o'clock.
He rose, stiff and cramped with sitting and at the same instant he saw
beyond the birchwood on the open stretch of common, a boy's figure,
which, after a start or two, he recognized as Ned Irwin.

'You here, Ned?' he said, stopping, the pastoral temper in him
reasserting itself at once. 'Why aren't you harvesting?'

'Please, sir, I finished with the Hall medders yesterday, and Mr.
Carter's job don't begin till to-morrow. He's got a machine coming from
Witley, he hev, and they won't let him have it till Thursday, so I