At last, in the January of his fourth year, the collapse became so decided, that he consented, bribed by the prospect of the Holy Land, to go away for three months to Egypt and the East, accompanied by his mother and a college friend.
Just before their departure news reached him of the death of the Rector of Murewell, followed by a formal offer of the living from Sir Mowbray.
At the moment when the letter arrived he was feeling desperately tired and ill, and in after-life he never forgot the half-superstitious thrill and deep sense of depression with which he received it.

For within him was a slowly emerging, despairing conviction that he was indeed physically unequal to the claims of his Oxford work, and if so, still more unequal to grappling with the hardest pastoral labor and the worst forms of English poverty.

And the coincidence of the Murewell incumbent's death struck his sensitive mind as a Divine leading.
But it was a painful defeat.

He took the letter to Grey, and Grey strongly advised him to accept.
'You overdrive your scruples, Elsmere,' said the Liberal tutor, with emphasis.

'No one can say a living with 1,200 souls, and no curate, is a sinecure.