and moderate,) for the most part it was the ideals of the past, the out-worn, romantic, and old-fashioned things, that had had time to be well-expressed, while the modern—"But all this has very little to do with Sutton!" he said, stopping suddenly.

"Oh, I don't know, isn't he the kind of person you mean—a sensitive poetic person—"

"Eliaphet Sutton! he never wrote poetry, did he?"

"No, I don't mean exactly that. Only it seems to me natural enough that a man of his temperament, coming to Oxford from an ugly new town, should not want to go back."

"Temperament!" Abel exclaimed, as if the word annoyed him. Then more quietly he added that he did not think anything could excuse Sutton for behaving in the way he had behaved. Why he himself had come to Oxford from a new town that was probably as ugly as Parnassus City. They were angry enough in Parnassus, you couldn't talk of temperaments out there! It had really broken Dr. Turnpenny's heart. "If you could only see his letters! No, after spending all the old man's money—"

"His money?" Foley asked.

"Yes, didn't you know? He was sent over on a subscription got up by the Methodist church there, and Dr. Turnpenny, who had adopted him and brought him up, gave all his savings. He was to go back of course, and help support Dr. Turnpenny. He was engaged to a girl out there too. And now he says he won't go back. But really he must, it doesn't matter what he says. It's the only honest and decent thing for him to do."

"Indeed he must go back," exclaimed Foley. "I hadn't the least idea!—"

XIX.

Foley went to Sutton's rooms again, but for several days he could hear nothing of him. One evening, however, when he was sitting in the garden, happening to look up, he saw the melancholy figure of the American coming down the garden path. Now that he actually saw Sutton, and was vividly aware of the atmosphere of reserve and solitude that enveloped him, Foley shrank from saying the things that he felt he ought to say. And yet someone must speak to him; someone must tell him his duty, and make him go back to the good simple people who had cared for him, supported him, and who relied on him so much!

He had been away, Sutton said, as the two young men walked slowly down the garden path. It was very still there in the twilight; and they were alone, shut in as it seemed, and very remote from the world outside.

"Have you decided yet when you are going home?" Foley asked.

"Home?"

"Yes; home to America."

"I don't know," Sutton replied. After a moment he added, in the same quiet voice, "perhaps I shall never go back."

"Then you have found some occupation in England?"

Sutton shook his head.

But didn't he think he ought to go back then, Foley asked. One had duties—and, trying to speak more lightly, he added, "You must have learned a great deal, Eliaphet, after studying all these years. Oughtn't you to go back and teach them out there?"

"I have nothing to teach them—nothing they would be willing to learn."

"Oh, but surely, if you tried you could find something! It seems to me you ought to try."

"Oh, I have tried!" he said, his cheeks flushing with painful emotion; "but now they don't want me to come back any more—they never want to see me again! I used to pray I might never change;—and when you would argue with me,—but now I see it was all wrong, and all my liberal ideas—"

"I hope," Foley interrupted, for this had been on his conscience ever since his talk with Abel, "I hope your change, whatever it is, has nothing to do with anything I ever said; you must have misunderstood me," and he went on to explain that he had never been really reactionary. He had always believed in compromise, and a conservative, reasonable progress.

"Do you know, Eliaphet," he went on, "I think you have made a mistake in staying here so long in this old place. It isn't wholesome to live so far from real life; you ought to get away, you ought to go home."

But Sutton had only listened to two or three of his friend's words. "No," he cried eagerly, "no, we can make no compromise. We must give up the human reason, we must go back to the Past, we must submit. Oh, Foley," he cried, and there was a strange appeal in his voice, "we have been friends, but now we may never see each other again,—let me warn you, you must decide whether you will be on the right or the wrong side—oh, if you only knew at what peril you refuse to listen!"

For a moment Foley was almost frightened. Then, reminding himself of reason and reality, he said, "But, Eliaphet, are you quite sure that you yourself are doing what is right in staying here? When so much depends on you out there—Dr. Turnpenny and all. And they have sacrificed so much too. Have you thought—"

"As if I was not always thinking of it!" Sutton cried; "but I could not go back to them a Roman Catholic; they would rather I was dead. And Foley, when you judge me, remember that I have had to make sacrifices too—I have given up everything, everything! What can I do?"

A Roman Catholic! Of course he could not go back. Foley was dismayed. Why had he not foreseen it?

For a moment they stood in silence. Then Sutton turned away.

"You don't understand," he said, in a voice that his friend always remembered afterwards; "No one understands," and he went down the path alone and out of Foley's sight.

XX.

When Foley went the next day to Sutton's lodgings, he was told that Sutton had already left Oxford; had gone away early that morning. Where he had gone, however, no one seemed to know. Certainly Foley never found out; he never saw Sutton again, nor, in spite of all his inquiries, did he ever hear anything but the most vague and uncertain news about him. Abel said he had never gone back to Parnassus City. And then, years after, it was reported that an Oxford man, when visiting some old shrine in Italy, had recognized, or thought he recognized, Sutton in the monk who showed him about the church.

Foley never got rid of a certain feeling of remorse, a sense that at the beginning he had too lightly interfered in the life of the young Dissenter.

But then he would tell himself, that it was probably after all nothing less than Oxford itself, with its old ways and memories, that had gradually changed and influenced the American. Influenced him not for good, surely! he thought. And indeed, remembering Sutton's slow estrangement from his early ideas and friends, his poor attempts to remain faithful, the trouble and mystery in which he had disappeared at last, Foley would ask himself, (and he took a strange sort of pleasure in the question,) whether there were not something really dangerous in the venerable and Gothic beauty of Oxford, a chill in the old shadows, an iron sound in the bells.