The sentiment of long-past days--days in Berlin, in Paris, where conversations such as that he had just passed through were the daily relief and reward of labor, was stirring in him. Occasionally he had endeavored to import the materials for them from the Continent, from London. But as a matter of fact, it was years since he had had any such talk as this with an Englishman on English ground, and he suddenly realized that he had been unwholesomely solitary, and that for the scholar there is no nerve stimulus like that of an occasional interchange of ideas with some one acquainted with his _Fach_. ‘Who would ever have thought of discovering instincts and aptitudes of such a kind in this long-legged optimist?’ The Squire shrugged his shoulders as he thought of the attempt involved in such a personality to combine both worlds, the world of action and the world of thought. Absurd! Of course, ultimately one or other must go to the wall. Meanwhile, what a ludicrous waste of time and opportunity that he and this man should have been at cross-purposes like this! ‘Why the deuce couldn’t he have given some rational account of himself to begin with!’ thought the Squire irritably, forgetting, of course, who it was that had wholly denied him the opportunity. ‘And then the sending back of those books: what a piece of idiocy!’ Granted an historical taste in this young parson, it was a curious chance, Mr. Wendover reflected, that in his choice of a subject he should just have fallen on the period of the later Empire--of the passage from the old-world to the new, where the Squire was a master. The Squire fell to thinking of the kind of knowledge implied in his remarks, of the stage he seemed to have reached, and then to cogitating as to the books he must be now in want of. He went back to his library, ran over the shelves, picking out volumes here and there with an unwonted glow and interest all the while. He sent for a case, and made a youth who sometimes acted as his secretary pack them. And still as he went back to his own work new names would occur to him, and full of the scholar’s avaricious sense of the shortness of time, he would shake his head and frown over the three months which young Elsmere had already passed, grappling with problems like Teutonic Arianism, the spread of Monasticism in Gaul, and Heaven knows what besides, half a mile from the man and the library which could have supplied him with the best help to be got in England, unbenefited by either! Mile End was obliterated, and the annoyance, of the morning forgotten. The next day was Sunday, a wet January Sunday, raw and sleety, the frost breaking up on all sides and flooding the roads with mire.