suddenly brought into play than any
suggested by the conversation itself.

'Certainly. _Judge not_--so long as a man has not judged himself,--only
till then. As to an open enemy, the Christian's path is clear. We are
but soldiers under orders. What business have we to be truce-making on
our own account? The war is not ours, but God's!'

Robert's eyes had kindled. He was about to indulge himself in such a
quick passage of arms as all such natures as his delight in, when his
look travelled past the gaunt figure of the Ritualist vicar to his wife.
A sudden pang smote, silenced him. She was sitting with her face raised
to Newcome; and her beautiful gray eyes were full of a secret passion of
sympathy. It was like the sudden re-emergence of something repressed,
the satisfaction of something hungry. Robert moved closer to her, and
the colour flushed over all his young boyish face.

'To me,' he said in a low voice, his eyes fixed rather on her than on
Newcome, 'a clergyman has enough to do with those foes of Christ he
cannot choose but recognise. There is no making truce with vice or
cruelty. Why should we complicate our task and spend in needless
struggle the energies we might give to love and to our brother?'

His wife turned to him. There was trouble in her look, then a swift
lovely dawn of something indescribable. Newcome moved away with a
gesture that was half bitterness, half weariness.

'Wait, my friend,' he said slowly, 'till you have watched that man's
books eating the very heart out of a poor creature as I have. When you
have once seen Christ robbed of a soul that might have been His, by the
infidel of genius, you will loathe all this Laodicean cant of tolerance
as I do!'

There was an awkward pause. Langham, with his eyeglass on, was carefully
examining the make of a carved paper-knife lying near him. The strained
preoccupied mind of the High Churchman had never taken the smallest
account of his presence, of which Robert had been keenly, not to say
humorously, conscious throughout.

But after a minute or so the tutor got up, strolled forward, and
addressed Robert on some Oxford topic of common interest. Newcome, in a
kind of dream which seemed to have suddenly descended on him, stood near
them, his priestly cloak falling in long folds about him, his ascetic
face grave and rapt. Gradually, however, the talk of the two men
dissipated the mystical cloud about him. He began to listen, to catch
the savour of Lang