 character something untoward might come out of this marriage. But she will mould him, rather than he her. Besides, she will have children—and that solves most things.'

Meanwhile, if Langham dissected the bride as he dissected most people, Robert, with that keen observation which lay hidden somewhere under his careless boyish ways, noticed many points of change about his old friend. Langham seemed to him less human, more strange, than ever; the points of contact between him and active life were lessening in number term by term. He lectured only so far as was absolutely necessary for the retention of his post, and he spoke with wholesale distaste of his pupils. He had set up a book on 'The Schools of Athens,' but when Robert saw the piles of disconnected notes already accumulated, he perfectly understood that the book was a mere blind, a screen, behind which a difficult fastidious nature trifled and procrastinated as it pleased.

Again, when Elsmere was an undergraduate Langham and Grey had been intimate. Now, Langham's tone à propos of Grey's politics and Grey's dreams of Church Reform was as languidly sarcastic as it was with regard to most of the strenuous things of life. 'Nothing particular is true,' his manner said, 'and all action is a degrading pis-aller. Get through the day somehow, with as little harm to yourself and other people as may be; do your duty if you like it, but, for heaven's sake, don't cant about it to other people!'

If the affinities of character count for much, Catherine and Henry Grey should certainly have understood each other. The tutor liked the look of Elsmere's wife. His kindly brown eyes rested on her with pleasure; he tried in his shy but friendly way to get at her, and there was in both of them a touch of homeliness, a sheer power of unworldliness that should have drawn them together. And indeed Catherine felt the charm, the spell of this born leader of men. But she watched him with[Pg 154] a sort of troubled admiration, puzzled, evidently, by the halo of moral dignity surrounding him, which contended with something else in her mind respecting him. Some words of Robert's, uttered very early in their acquaintance, had set her on her guard. Speaking of religion, Robert had said, 'Grey is not one of us'; and Catherine, restrained by a hundred ties of training and temperament, would not surrender herself, and could not if she would.

Then had followed their home
