never took hold upon him. But
to the English Church as a great national institution for the promotion
of God's work on earth no one could have been more deeply loyal, and
none coming close to him could mistake the fervour and passion of his
Christian feeling. At the same time he did not know what rancour or
bitterness meant, so that men of all shades of Christian belief reckoned
a friend in him, and he went through life surrounded by an unusual,
perhaps a dangerous amount of liking and affection. He threw himself
ardently into the charitable work of Oxford, now helping a High Church
vicar, and now toiling with Grey and one or two other Liberal fellows,
at the maintenance of a coffee-palace and lecture-room just started by
them in one of the suburbs; while in the second year of his lectureship
the success of some first attempts at preaching fixed the attention of
the religious leaders upon him as upon a man certain to make his mark.

So the three years passed--years not, perhaps, of great intellectual
advance, for other forces in him than those of the intellect were mainly
to the fore, but years certainly of continuous growth in character and
moral experience. And at the end of them Mowbray Elsmere made his offer,
and it was accepted.

The secret of it, of course, was overwork. Mrs. Elsmere, from the little
house in Merton Street, where she had established herself, had watched
her boy's meteoric career through these crowded months with very
frequent misgivings. No one knew better than she that Robert was
constitutionally not of the toughest fibre, and she realised long before
he did that the Oxford life as he was bent on leading it must end for
him in premature breakdown. But, as always happens, neither her
remonstrances, nor Mr. Grey's common-sense, nor Langham's fidgety
protests had any effect on the young enthusiast to whom self-slaughter
came so easy. During the latter half of his third year of teaching he
was continually being sent away by the doctors, and coming back only to
break down again. At last, in the January of his fourth year, the
collapse became so decided that he consented, bribed by the prospect of
the Holy Land, to go away for three months to Egypt and the East,
accompanied by his mother and a college friend.

Just before their departure news reached him of the death of the rector
of Murewell, followed by a formal offer of the living from Sir Mowbray.
At the moment when the letter arrived he was fee