p.
They sate near a great syringa bush, the perfume of which shrub in
later years always brought back the scene before him; overhead, among
the boughs of a lime-tree, a thrush fluted now cheerfully, now
pathetically, like one who was testing a gift of lyrical improvisation.
The elder man, wearied by a hard term's work, displayed a certain
irritability of argument. Hugh held tenaciously to his points; and at
last, after a silence, his friend turned to him and said, "Well, after
all, it reduces itself to this; have you an interior witness to the
truth of what you say, which you can honestly hold to be superior to
the exterior evidences of its improbability?" Hugh smiled uneasily,
and conscious that he was saying something which he hoped rather than
knew, said, "I think I have." The older man shrugged his shoulders and
said, "Then I can say no more!"--nor did he ever again revert to the
question, from what Hugh thought was a real generosity and tenderness
of spirit.

All the time Hugh practised a species of emotional religion, attending
the chapel services devoutly, even willingly hearing sermons. There
was a little dark church, in a tiny courtyard hemmed in by houses, and
approached by a narrow passage, served by a Fellow of a neighbouring
college, who preached gentle devotional discourses on Sunday evenings,
to which many undergraduates used to go. These were a great help to
Hugh, because they transferred religion from the intellectual to the
spiritual region; and thus, though he was gradually made aware of the
weakness of his intellectual position, he continued his religious life,
in the hope that the door of a mystery might some day be opened to him,
and that he might arrive, by an inner process, at a conviction which
his intellect could not give him. But here as elsewhere he was swayed
by a species of timidity and caution. While on the one hand his
intellect told him that there was no sure and incontrovertible
standing-ground for the orthodoxy which he professed, yet, on the other
hand, he could not bear to relinquish the chance that certainty might
be found on different lines.

In the middle of these speculations, he suffered a dark experience. He
fell, for the first time in his life, into ill-health. His vitality
and nervous force were great, and though soon depleted were soon
recuperated; but the new and ardent interests of the university had
appealed to him on many sides; he worked hard, took violent ex