She paused, as though she had strayed on to a topic where expression
was a little difficult. Then his big face and clerical dress seemed
somehow to reassure her, and she began again, though reluctantly.

'He used to say that it was all so changed. The young fellows he
saw when he went back scorned everything he cared for. Every visit
to Oxford was like a stab to him. It seemed to him as if the place
was full of men 'Who only wanted to destroy and break down everything
that was sacred to him.'

Elsmere reflected that Richard Leyburn must have left Oxford about
the beginning of the Liberal reaction, which followed Tractarianism,
and in twenty years transformed the University.

'Ah!' he said, smiling gently. 'He should have lived a little
longer. There is another turn of the tide since then. The destructive
wave has spent itself, and at Oxford now many of us feel ourselves
on the upward swell of a religious revival.'

Catherine looked up at him with a sweet sympathetic look. That dim
vision of Oxford, with its gray, tree-lined walls, lay very near
to her heart for her father's sake. And the keen face above her
seemed to satisfy and respond to her inner feeling.

'I know the High Church influence is very strong,' she said,
hesitating; 'but I don't know whether father would have liked that
much 'better.'

The last words had slipped out of her, and she checked herself