"He giveth his Beloved sleep."
These words irradiated and soothed him quite miraculously, the

clouds of doubt seemed to dissolve and vanish and leave him safe
and calm under a clear sky; he knew those words were a promise,

and very speedily he fell asleep and slept until he was called.
But the next day was a troubled one. Whippham had muddled his

timetable and crowded his afternoon; the strike of the transport
workers had begun, and the ugly noises they made at the tramway

depot, where they were booing some one, penetrated into the
palace. He had to snatch a meal between services, and the sense

of hurry invaded his afternoon lectures to the candidates. He
hated hurry in Ember week. His ideal was one of quiet serenity,

of grave things said slowly, of still, kneeling figures, of a
sort of dark cool spiritual germination. But what sort of dark

cool spiritual germination is possible with an ass like Whippham
about?

In the fresh courage of the morning the bishop had arranged for
that talk with Eleanor he had already deferred too long, and this

had proved less satisfactory than he had intended it to be.
The bishop's experience with the ordination candidates was

following the usual course. Before they came there was something
bordering upon distaste for the coming invasion; then always

there was an effect of surprise at the youth and faith of the
neophytes and a real response of the spirit to the occasion.

Throughout the first twenty-four hours they were all simply
neophytes, without individuality to break up their uniformity of

self-devotion. Then afterwards they began to develop little
personal traits, and scarcely ever were these pleasing traits.

Always one or two of them would begin haunting the bishop, giving
way to an appetite for special words, special recognitions. He

knew the expression of that craving on their faces. He knew the
way-laying movements in room and passage that presently began.

This time in particular there was a freckled underbred young
man who handed in what was evidently a carefully prepared

memorandum upon what he called "my positions." Apparently he had
a muddle of doubts about the early fathers and the dates of the

earlier authentic copies of the gospels, things of no conceivable
significance.

The bishop glanced through this bale of papers--it had of
course no index and no synopsis, and some of the pages were not

numbered--handed it over to Whippham, and when he proved, as
usual, a broken reed, the bishop had the brilliant idea of

referring the young man to Canon Bliss (of Pringle), "who has a
special knowledge quite beyond my own in this field."

But he knew from the young man's eye even as he said this that
it was not going to put him off for more than a day or so.

The immediate result of glancing over these papers was,
however, to enhance in the bishop's mind a growing disposition to

minimize the importance of all dated and explicit evidences and
arguments for orthodox beliefs, and to resort to vague symbolic

and liberal interpretations, and it was in this state that he
came to his talk with Eleanor.

He did not give her much time to develop her objections. He met
her half way and stated them for her, and overwhelmed her with

sympathy and understanding. She had been "too literal." "Too
literal" was his keynote. He was a little astonished at the

liberality of his own views. He had been getting along now for
some years without looking into his own opinions too closely and

he was by no means prepared to discover how far he had come to
meet his daughter's scepticisms. But he did meet them. He met

them so thoroughly that he almost conveyed that hers was a
needlessly conservative and oldfashioned attitude.

Occasionally he felt he was being a little evasive, but she did
not seem to notice it. As she took his drift, her relief and

happiness were manifest. And he had never noticed before how
clear and pretty her eyes were; they were the most honest eyes he

had ever seen. She looked at him very steadily as he explained,
and lit up at his points. She brightened wonderfully as she

realized that after all they were not apart, they had not
differed; simply they had misunderstood....

And before he knew where he was, and in a mere parenthetical
declaration of liberality, he surprised himself by conceding her

demand for Newnham even before she had repeated it. It helped his
case wonderfully.

"Call in every exteriorwitness you can. The church will
welcome them.... No, I want you to go, my dear...."

But his mind was stirred again to its depths by this
discussion. And in particular he was surprised and a little

puzzled by this Newnham concession and the necessity of making
his new attitude clear to Lady Ella....

It was with a sense of fatality that he found himself awake
again that night, like some one lying drowned and still and yet

perfectly conscious at the bottom of deep cold water.
He repeated, "He giveth his Beloved sleep," but all the

conviction had gone out of the words.
(4)

Neither the bishop's insomnia nor his incertitudes about
himself and his faith developed in a simple and orderly manner.

There were periods of sustained suffering and periods of
recovery; it was not for a year or so that he regarded these

troubles as more than acute incidental interruptions of his
general tranquillity or realized that he was passing into a new

phase of life and into a new quality of thought. He told every
one of the insomnia and no one of his doubts; these he betrayed

only by an increasing tendency towards vagueness, symbolism,
poetry and toleration. Eleanor seemed satisfied with his

exposition; she did not press for further enlightenment. She
continued all her outward conformities except that after a time

she ceased to communicate; and in September she went away to
Newnham. Her doubts had not visibly affected Clementina or her

other sisters, and the bishop made no further attempts to explore
the spiritual life of his family below the surface of its formal

acquiescence.
As a matter of fact his own spiritual wrestlings were almost

exclusively nocturnal. During his spells of insomnia he led a
curiously double existence. In the daytime he was largely the

self he had always been, able, assured, ecclesiastical, except
that he was a little jaded and irritable or sleepy instead of

being quick and bright; he believed in God and the church and the
Royal Family and himself securely; in the wakeful night time he

experienced a different and novel self, a bare-minded self,
bleakly fearless at its best, shamelessly weak at its worst,

critical, sceptical, joyless, anxious. The anxiety was quite the
worst element of all. Something sat by his pillow asking grey

questions: "What are you doing? Where are you going? Is it really
well with the children? Is it really well with the church? Is it

really well with the country? Are you indeed doing anything at
all? Are you anything more than an actor wearing a costume in an

archaic play? The people turn their backs on you."
He would twist over on his pillow. He would whisper hymns and

prayers that had the quality of charms.
"He giveth his Beloved sleep"; that answered many times, and

many times it failed.
The labour troubles of 1912 eased off as the year wore on, and

the bitterness of the local press over the palace abated very
considerably. Indeed there was something like a watery gleam of

popularity when he brought down his consistent friend, the dear
old Princess Christiana of Hoch and Unter, black bonnet,

deafness, and all, to open a new wing of the children's hospital.
The Princhester conservative paper took the occasion to inform

the diocese that he was a fluent German scholar and consequently
a persona grata with the royal aunts, and that the Princess

Christiana was merely just one of a number of royalties now
practically at the beck and call of Princhester. It was not true,

but it was very effective locally, and seemed to justify a little
the hauteur of which Lady Ella was so unjustly suspected. Yet it

involved a possibility of disappointments in the future.