; and sitting there with his elbows on his knees, his gaze fixed on the yellowing afternoon sky, and the intricacies of the garden-walls between them and the new Museum, he went through the history of the last two years. He described the beginnings of his historical work, the gradual enlargement of the mind's horizons, and the intrusion within them of question after question, and subject after subject. Then he mentioned the squire's name.

'Ah!' exclaimed Mr. Grey, 'I had forgotten you were that man's neighbour. I wonder he didn't set you against the whole business, inhuman old cynic!'

He spoke with the strong dislike of the idealist, devoted in practice to an everyday ministry to human need, for the intellectual egotist. Robert caught and relished the old pugnacious flash in the eye, the Midland strength of accent.

'Cynic he is, not altogether inhuman, I think. I fought him about his drains and his cottages, however,'—and he smiled sadly—'before I began to read his books. But the man's genius is incontestable, his learning enormous. He found me in a susceptible state, and I recognise that his influence immensely accelerated a process already begun.'

Mr. Grey was struck with the simplicity and fulness of the avowal. A lesser man would hardly have made it in the same way. Rising to pace up and down the room—the familiar action recalling vividly to Robert the Sunday afternoons of bygone years—he began to put questions with a clearness and decision that made them so many guides to the man answering, through the tangle of his own recollections.

'I see,' said the tutor at last, his hands in the pockets of his short gray coat, his brow bent and thoughtful. 'Well, the process in you has been the typical process of the present day. Abstract thought has had little or nothing to say to it. It has been all a question of literary and historical evidence. I am old-fashioned enough'—and he smiled—'to stick to the à priori impossibility of miracles, but then I am a philosopher! You have come to see how miracle is manufactured, to recognise in it merely a natural inevitable outgrowth of human testimony, in its pre-scientific stages. It has been all experimental, inductive. I imagine'—he looked up—'you didn't get much help out of the orthodox apologists?'

Robert shrugged his shoulders.

'It often seemed to me,' he said drearily, 'I might have got through,