When would the Squire know? He pictured the interview with him, divining, with the same abnormal clearness of inward vision Mr. Wendover’s start of mingled triumph and impatience--triumph in the new recruit, impatience with the Quixotic folly which could lead a man to look upon orthodox dogma as a thing real enough to be publicly renounced, or clerical pledges as more than form of words. So henceforth he was on the same side with the Squire, held by an indiscriminating world as bound to the same negations, the same hostilities! The thought roused in him a sudden fierceness of moral repugnance. The Squire and Edward Langham--they were the only sceptics of whom he had ever had close and personal experience. And with all his old affection for Langham, all his frank sense of pliancy in the Squire’s hands,--yet in this strait of life how he shrinks from them both!--souls at war with life and man, without holiness, without perfume! Is it the law of things? ‘Once loosen a man’s _religio_, once fling away the old binding elements, the old traditional restraints which have made him what he is, and moral deterioration is certain.’ How often he has heard it said! How often he has endorsed it! Is it true? His heart grows cold within him. What good man can ever contemplate with patience the loss--not of friends or happiness, but of his best self? What shall it profit a man, indeed, if he gain the whole world--the whole world of knowledge, and speculation,--and _lose his own soul_? And then, for his endless comfort, there rose on the inward eye the vision of an Oxford lecture room, of a short, sturdy figure, of a great brow over honest eyes, of words alive with moral passion, of thought instinct with the beauty of holiness. Thank God for the saint in Henry Grey! Thinking of it, Robert felt his own self-respect re-born. Oh! to see Grey in the flesh, to get his advice, his approval! Even though it was the depth of vacation, Grey was so closely connected with the town, as distinguished from the university, life of Oxford, it might be quite possible to find him at home. Elsmere suddenly determined to find out at once if he could be seen. And if so, he would go over to Oxford at once. _This_ should be the next step, and he would say nothing to Catherine till afterward. He felt himself so dull, so weary, so resourceless. Grey should help and counsel him, should send him back with a clearer brain--a quicker ingenuity of love, better furnished against her pain and his own.