o it?'

'Just about. I have got down below the surface, and am beginning to feel
the joys of digging;' and Robert threw back his head with one of his
most brilliant enthusiastic smiles. 'I have been shy about boring you
with the thing, but the fact is, I am very keen indeed; and this library
has been a godsend!'

'So I should think.' Langham sat down on one of the carved wooden stools
placed at intervals along the bookcases and looked at his friend, his
psychological curiosity rising a little.

'Tell me,' he said presently--'tell me what interests you
specially--what seizes you--in a subject like the making of France, for
instance?'

'Do you really want to know?' said Robert, incredulously.

The other nodded. Robert left his place, and began to walk up and down,
trying to answer Langham's question, and at the same time to fix in
speech a number of sentiments and impressions bred in him by the work of
the past few months. After a while Langham began to see his way.
Evidently the forces at the bottom of this new historical interest were
precisely the same forces at work in Elsmere's parish plans, in his
sermons, in his dealings with the poor and the young--forces of
imagination and sympathy. What was enchaining him to this new study was
not, to begin with, that patient love of ingenious accumulation which is
the learned temper proper, the temper, in short, of science. It was
simply a passionate sense of the human problems which underlie all the
dry and dusty detail of history and give it tone and colour, a
passionate desire to rescue something more of human life from the
drowning, submerging past, to realise for himself and others the
solidarity and continuity of mankind's long struggle from the beginning
until now.

Langham had had much experience of Elsmere's versatility and pliancy,
but he had never realised it so much as now, while he sat listening to
the vivid, many-coloured speech getting quicker and quicker, and more
and more telling and original as Robert got more absorbed and excited by
what he had to say. He was endeavouring to describe to Langham the sort
of book he thought might be written on the rise of modern society in
Gaul, dwelling first of all on the outward spectacle of the
blood-stained Frankish world as it was, say, in the days of Gregory the
Great, on its savage kings, its fiendish women, its bishops and its
saints; and then, on the conflict of ideas going on behind all the
fierce incoherence