So, after a moment or two, Robert went on to describe in detail some of those individual cases of hardship and disease at Mile End, during the preceding year, which could be most clearly laid to the sanitary condition of the place. Filth, damp, leaking roofs, foul floors, poisoned water--he traced to each some ghastly human ill, telling his stories with a nervous brevity, a suppressed fire, which would have burnt them into the sense of almost any other listener. Not one of these woes but he and Catherine had tended with sickening pity and labor of body and mind. That side of it he kept rigidly out of sight. But all that he could hurl against the Squire’s feeling, as it were, he gathered up, strangely conscious through it all of his own young persistent yearning to right himself with this man, whose mental history, as it lay chronicled in these rooms, had been to him, at a time of intellectual hunger, so stimulating, so enriching. But passion, and reticence, and bidden sympathy were alike lost upon the Squire. Before he paused Mr. Wendover had already risen restlessly from his chair, and from the rug was glowering down on his, unwelcome visitor. Good heavens! had he come home to be lectured in his own library by this fanatical slip of a parson? As for his stories, the Squire barely took the trouble to listen to them. Every popularity-hunting fool, with a passion for putting his hand into other people’s pockets, can tell pathetic stories; but it was intolerable that his scholar’s privacy should be at the mercy of one of the tribe.