Elsmere apparently was not perfectly happy. He sat balancing his long person over the arm of a chair listening to the recital of some of the High Churchman’s parish troubles with a slight half-embarrassed smile. The Vicar of Mottringham was always in trouble. The narrative he was pouring out took shape in Langham’s sarcastic sense as a sort of classical epic, with the High Churchman as a new champion of Christendom, harassed on all sides by pagan parishioners, crass churchwardens, and treacherous bishops. Catherine’s fine face grew more and more set, nay disdainful. Mr. Newcome was quite blind to it. Women never entered into his calculations except as sisters or as penitents. At a certain diocesan conference he had discovered a sympathetic fibre in the young Rector of Murewell, which had been to the imperious, persecuted zealot like water to the thirsty. He had come to-day, drawn by the same quality in Elsmere as had originally attracted Langham to the St. Anselm’s undergraduate, and he sat pouring himself out with as much freedom as if all his companions had been as ready as he was to die for an alb, or to spend half their days in piously circumventing a bishop. But presently the conversation had slid, no one knew how, from Mottringham and its intrigues to London and its teeming East. Robert was leading, his eye now on the apostalic-looking priest, now on his wife. Mr. Newcome resisted, but Robert had his way. Then it came out that behind these battles of kites and crows at Mottringhan, there lay an heroic period when the pale ascetic had wrestled ten years with London Poverty, leaving health and youth and nerves behind him in the mêelée. Robert dragged it out at last, that struggle, into open view, but with difficulty. The Ritualist may glory in the discomfiture of an Erastian bishop--what Christian dare parade ten years of love to God and man? And presently round Elsmere’s lip there dawned a little smile of triumph. Catherine had shaken off her cold silence, her Puritan aloofness, was bending forward eagerly--listening. Stroke by stroke, as the words and facts were beguiled from him, all that was futile and quarrelsome in the sharp-featured priest sank out of sight; the face glowed with inward light; the stature of the man seemed to rise; the angel in him unsheathed its wings. Suddenly the story of the slums that Mr. Newcome was telling--a story of the purest Christian heroism told in the simplest way--came to an end, and Catherine leaned toward him with a long quivering breath. ‘Oh, thank you, thank you! That must have been a joy, a privilege!’ Mr. Newcome turned and looked at her with surprise. ‘Yes, it was a privilege,’ he said slowly--the story had been an account of the rescue of a young country lad from a London den of thieves and profligates--‘you are right; it was just that.’ And then some sensitive inner fibre of the man was set vibrating, and he would talk no more of himself or his past, do what they would.