appearance of any one else, and led him in the most natural
manner into the new but already very pleasant shrubbery.

In some indefinable special way the bishop had been aware of
Lady Sunderbund's presence since first he had met her, but it was

only now that he could observe her with any particularity. She
was tall like his own Lady Ella but not calm and quiet; she was

electric, her eyes, her smiles, her complexion had as it were an
established brightness that exceeded the common lustre of things.

This morning she was dressed in grey that was nevertheless not
grey but had an effect of colour, and there was a thread of black

along the lines of her body and a gleam of gold. She carried her
head back with less dignity than pride; there was a little frozen

movement in her dark hair as if it flamed up out of her head.
There were silver ornaments in her hair. She spoke with a pretty

little weakness of the r's that had probably been acquired
abroad. And she lost no time in telling him, she was eager to

tell him, that she had been waylaying him. "I did so want to talk
to you some maw," she said. "I was shy last night and they we'

all so noisy and eaga'. I p'ayed that you might come down early.
"It's an oppo'tunity I've longed for," she said.

She did her very pretty best to convey what it was had been
troubling her. 'iligion bad been worrying her for years. Life was

--oh--just ornaments and games and so wea'isome, so wea'isome,
unless it was 'iligious. And she couldn't get it 'iligious.

The bishop nodded his head gravely.
"You unde'stand?" she pressed.

"I understand too well--the attempt to get hold--and keep
hold."

"I knew you would!" she cried.
She went on with an impulsiverapidity. O'thodoxy had always

'ipelled her,--always. She had felt herself confronted by the
most insurmountable difficulties, and yet whenever she had gone

away from Christianity--she had gone away from Christianity, to
the Theosophists and the Christian Scientists--she had felt she

was only "st'aying fu'tha." And then suddenly when he was
speaking last night, she had felt he knew. It was so wonderful to

hear the "k'eed was only a symbol."
"Symbol is the proper name for it," said the bishop. "It wasn't

for centuries it was called the Creed."
Yes, and so what it really meant was something quite different

from what it did mean.
The bishop felt that this sentence also was only a symbol, and

nodded encouragingly--but gravely, warily.
And there she was, and the point was there were thousands and

thousands and thousands of educated people like her who were
dying to get through these old-fashionedsymbols to the true

faith that lay behind them. That they knew lay behind them. She
didn't know if he had read "The Light under the Altar"?

"He's vicar of Wombash--in my diocese," said the bishop with
restraint.

"It's wonde'ful stuff," said Lady Sunderbund. "It's spi'tually
cold, but it's intellectually wonde'ful. But we want that with

spi'tuality. We want it so badly. If some one--"
She became daring. She bit her under lip and flashed her spirit

at him.
"If you--" she said and paused.

"Could think aloud," said the bishop.
"Yes," she said, nodding rapidly, and became breathless to

hear.
It would certainly be an astonishing end to the Chasters

difficulty if the bishop went over to the heretic, the bishop
reflected.

"My dear lady, I won't disguise," he began; "in fact I don't
see how I could, that for some years I have been growing more and

more discontented with some of our most fundamental formulae. But
it's been very largely a shapeless discontent--hitherto. I

don't think I've said a word to a single soul. No, not a word.
You are the first person to whom I've ever made the admission

that even my feelings are at times unorthodox."
She lit up marvellously at his words. "Go on," she whispered.

But she did not need to tell him to go on. Now that he had once
broached the casket of his reserves he was only too glad of a

listener. He talked as if they were intimate and loving friends,
and so it seemed to both of them they were. It was a wonderful

release from a long and painful solitude.
To certain types it is never quite clear what has happened to

them until they tell it. So that now the bishop, punctuated very
prettily by Lady Sunderbund, began to measure for the first time

the extent of his departure from the old innate convictions of
Otteringham Rectory. He said that it was strange to find doubt

coming so late in life, but perhaps it was only in recent years
that his faith had been put to any really severe tests. It had

been sheltered and unchallenged.
"This fearful wa'," Lady Sunderbund interjected.

But Princhester had been a critical and trying change, and "The
Light under the Altar" case had ploughed him deeply. It was

curious that his doubts always seemed to have a double strand;
there was a moral objection based on the church's practical

futility and an intellectual strand subordinated to this which
traced that futility largely to its unconvincing formulae.

"And yet you know," said the bishop, "I find I can't go with
Chasters. He beats at the church; he treats her as though she

were wrong. I feel like a son, growing up, who finds his mother
isn't quite so clear-spoken nor quite so energetic as she seemed

to be once. She's right, I feel sure. I've never doubted her
fundamental goodness."

"Yes," said Lady Sunderbund, very eagerly, "yes."
"And yet there's this futility.... You know, my dear lady, I

don't know what to do. One feels on the one hand, that here is a
cloud of witnesses, great men, sainted men, subtle men, figures

permanently historical, before whom one can do nothing but bow
down in the utmosthumility, here is a great instrument and

organization--what would the world be without the witness of the
church?--and on the other hand here are our masses out of hand

and hostile, our industrial leaders equallyhostile; there is a
failure to grip, and that failure to grip is so clearly traceable

to the fact that our ideas are not modern ideas, that when we
come to profess our faith we find nothing in our mouths but

antiquated Alexandrian subtleties and phrases and ideas that may
have been quite alive, quite significant, quite adequate in Asia

Minor or Egypt, among men essentially orientals, fifteen hundred
years ago, but which now--?

He expressed just what they came to now by a gesture.
She echoed his gesture.

"Probably I'm not alone among my brethren," he went on, and
then: "But what is one to do?"

With her hands she acted her sense of his difficulty.
"One may be precipitate," he said. "There's a kind of loyalty

and discipline that requires one to keep the ranks until one's
course of action is perfectly clear. One owes so much to so many.

One has to consider how one may affect--oh! people one has never
seen."

He was lugging things now into speech that so far had been
scarcely above the threshold of his conscious thought. He went on

to discuss the entire position of the disbelieving cleric. He
discovered a fine point.

"If there was something else, an alternative, another religion,
another Church, to which one could go, the whole case would be