Robert forbore the natural retort.
The squire went round his library, making remarks, with all the caustic shrewdness natural to him, on the new volumes that Robert had acquired since their walks and talks together.
'The Germans,' he said at last, putting back a book into the shelves with a new accent of distaste and weariness, 'are beginning to founder in the sea of their own learning. Sometimes I think I will read no more German. It is a nation of learned fools, none of whom ever sees an inch beyond his own professorial nose.'
Then he stayed to luncheon, and Catherine, moved by many feelings—perhaps in subtle striving against her own passionate sense of wrong at this man's hands—was kind to him, and talked and smiled, indeed, so much that the squire for the first time in his life took individual notice of her, and as he parted with Elsmere in the hall made the remark that Mrs. Elsmere seemed to like London, to which Robert, busy in an opportune search for his guest's coat, made no reply.
'When are you coming to Murewell?' the squire said to him abruptly, as he stood at the door muffled up as though it were December. 'There are a good many points in that last article you want talking to about. Come next month with Mrs. Elsmere.'
Robert drew a long breath, inspired by many feelings.
'I will come, but not yet. I must get broken in here more thoroughly first. Murewell touches me too deeply, and my wife. You are going abroad in the summer, you say. Let me come to you in the autumn.'
The squire said nothing, and went his way, leaning heavily on his stick, across the square. Robert felt himself a brute to let him go, and almost ran after him.
That evening Robert was disquieted by the receipt of a note from a young fellow of St. Anselm's, an intimate friend and occasional secretary of Grey. Grey, the writer said, had received Robert's last letter, was deeply interested in his account of his work, and begged him to write again. He would have written, but that he was himself in the doctor's hands, suffering from various ills, probably connected with an attack of malarial fever which had befallen him in Rome the year before.