ral 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--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 Morton Street where she had established herself, had watched
her boy's meteoric career through those crowded months with very
frequent misgivings. No one knew better than she that Robert was
constitutionally not of the toughest fibre, and she realized 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
remonstrance, 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 feeling desperately tired
and ill, and in after-life he never forgot the half-superstitious thrill
and deep sense of depression with which he received it. For within
him was a slowly emerging, despairing conviction that he was indeed
physically unequal to the claims of his Oxford work, and if so, still
more unequal to grappling with the hardest pastoral labor and the
worst forms of English poverty. And the coincidence of the Murewell
incumbent's death struck his sensitive mind as a Divine leading.

But it was a painful defeat. He took the letter to Grey, and Grey
strongly advised him to accept.

'You overdrive your scruples, Elsmere,' said the Libe