‘I think we ought to understand one another perhaps, Mr. Wendover,’ Robert said, speaking under a quick sense of oppression, but with his usual dignity and bright courtesy. ‘I know your opinions, of course, from your book; you know what mine, as an honest man, must be, from the position I hold. My conscience does not forbid me to discuss anything, only--I am no match for you on points of scholarship, and I should just like to say once for all, that to me, whatever else is true, the religion of Christ is true. I am a Christian and a Christian minister. Therefore, whenever we come to discuss what may be called Christian evidence, I do it with reserves, which you would not have. I believe in an Incarnation, a Resurrection, a Revelation. If there are literary difficulties, I must want to smooth them away--you may want to make much of them. We come to the matter from different points of view. You will not quarrel with me for wanting to make it clear. It isn’t as if we differed slightly. We differ fundamentally--is it not so?’ The Squire was walking beside him with bent shoulders, the lower lip pushed forward, as was usual with him when he was considering a matter with close attention, but did not mean to communicate his thoughts. After a pause he said, with a faint, inscrutable smile,-- ‘Your reminder is perfectly just. Naturally we all have our reserves. Neither of us can be expected to stultify his own.’ And the talk went forward again, Robert joining in more buoyantly than ever, perhaps because he had achieved a necessary but disagreeable thing and got done with it. In reality he had but been doing as the child does when it sets up its sand-barrier against the tide. CHAPTER XXIII. It, was the beginning of April. The gorse was fast extending its golden empire over the commons. On the sunny slopes of the copses primroses were breaking through the hazel roots and beginning to gleam along the edges of the river. On the grass commons between Murewell and Mile End the birches rose like green clouds against the browns and purples of the still leafless oaks and beeches. The birds were twittering and building. Every day Robert was on the lookout for the swallows, or listening for the first notes of the nightingale amid the bare spring coverts. But the spring was less perfectly delightful to him than it might have been, for Catherine was away. Mrs. Leyburn, who was to have come south to them in February, was attacked by bronchitis instead at Burwood and forbidden to move, even to a warmer climate. In March, Catherine, feeling restless and anxious about her mother, and thinking it hard that Agnes should have all the nursing and responsibility tore herself from her man and her baby, and went north to Whindale for a fortnight, leaving Robert forlorn.