ad enough of the Wendovers, and started something else.

'So you physic bodies as well as minds?' he said, pointing to the
medicine cupboard.

'I should think so!' cried Robert, brightening at once. 'Last winter I
causticked all the diphtheritic throats in the place with my own hand.
Our parish doctor is an infirm old noodle, and I just had to do it. And
if the state of part of the parish remains what it is, it's a pleasure I
may promise myself most years. But it shan't remain what it is.'

And the rector reached out his hand again for his pipe, and gave one or
two energetic puffs to it as he surveyed his friend stretched before him
in the depths of an armchair.

'I will make myself a public nuisance, but the people shall have their
drains!'

'It seems to me,' said Langham, musing, 'that in my youth people talked
about Ruskin; now they talk about drains.'

'And quite right too. Dirt and drains, Catherine says I have gone mad
upon them. It's all very well, but they are the foundations of a sound
religion.'

'Dirt, drains, and Darwin,' said Langham meditatively, taking up
Darwin's _Earthworms_, which lay on the study table beside him, side by
side with a volume of Grant Allen's _Sketches_. 'I didn't know you cared
for this sort of thing!'

Robert did not answer for a moment, and a faint flush stole into his
face.

'Imagine, Langham!' he said presently, 'I had never read even _The
Origin of Species_ before I came here. We used to take the thing half
for granted, I remember, at Oxford, in a more or less modified sense.
But to drive the mind through all the details of the evidence, to force
one's self to understand the whole hypothesis and the grounds for it, is
a very different matter. It is a revelation.'

'Yes,' said Langham; and could not forbear adding, 'but it is a
revelation, my friend, that has not always been held to square with
other revelations.'

In general these two kept carefully off the religious ground. The man
who is religious by nature tends to keep his treasure hid from the man
who is critical by nature, and Langham was much more interested in other
things. But still it had always been understood that each was free to
say what he would.

'There was a natural panic,' said Robert, throwing back his head at the
challenge. 'Men shrank and will always shrink, say what you will, from
what seems to touch things dearer to them than life. But the panic is
passing. The smoke is clearing away, and we