life and healing nowadays, as did those old stirrings of the waters. The
first Modernist bishop who stays in his place forms a Modernist chapter
and diocese around him, and fights the fight where he stands, will do
more for liberty and faith in the Church, I now sadly believe, than
those scores of brave "forgotten dead" who have gone out of her for
conscience' sake, all these years.

But to return to the book. All through March the tide of success was
rapidly rising; and when I was able to think of it I was naturally
carried away by the excitement and astonishment of it. But with the
later days of March a veil dropped between me and the book. My mother's
suffering and storm-beaten life was coming rapidly to its close, and I
could think of nothing else. In an interval of slight improvement,
indeed, when it seemed as though she might rally for a time, I heard Mr.
Gladstone's name quoted for the first time in connection with the book.
It will be remembered that he was then out of office, having been
overthrown on the Home Rule Question in 1886, and he happened to be
staying for an Easter visit with the Warden of Keble, and Mrs. Talbot,
who was his niece by marriage. I was with my mother, about a mile away,
and Mrs. Talbot, who came to ask for news of her, reported to me that
Mr. Gladstone was deep in the book. He was reading it, pencil in hand,
marking all the passages he disliked or quarreled with, with the Italian
"_Ma_!"--and those he approved of with mysterious signs which she who
followed him through the volumes could not always decipher. Mr. Knowles,
she reported, the busy editor of the _Nineteenth Century_, was trying to
persuade the great man to review it. But "Mr. G." had not made up
his mind.

Then all was shut out again. Through many days my mother asked
constantly for news of the book, and smiled with a flicker of her old