he thought the less they seemed to be on Likeman's side, until at

last they began to take on a complexion entirely opposed to the
old man's insidious arguments, until indeed they began to bear

the extraordinaryinterpretation of a special message,
unwittingly delivered.

(8)
The bishop was still thinking over this communication when he

was interrupted by Lady Ella. She came with a letter in her hand
to ask him whether she might send five-and-twenty pounds to a

poor cousin of his, a teacher in a girls' school, who had been
incapacitated from work by a dislocation of the cartilage of her

knee. If she could go to that unorthodox but successful
practitioner, Mr. Barker, the bone-setter, she was convinced she

could be restored to efficiency. But she had no ready money. The
bishop agreed without hesitation. His only doubt was the

certainty of the cure, but upon that point Lady Ella was
convinced; there had been a great experience in the Walshingham

family.
"It is pleasant to be able to do things like this," said Lady

Ella, standing over him when this matter was settled.
"Yes," the bishop agreed; "it is pleasant to be in a position

to do things like this...."
CHAPTER THE SEVENTH - THE SECOND VISION

(1)
A MONTH later found the bishop's original state of perplexity

and insomnia returned and intensified. He had done none of all
the things that had seemed so manifestly needing to be done after

his vision in the Athenaeum. All the relief and benefit of his
experience in London had vanished out of his life. He was afraid

of Dr. Dale's drug; he knew certainly that it would precipitate
matters; and all his instincts in the state of moral enfeeblement

to which he had relapsed, were to temporize.
Although he had said nothing further about his changed beliefs

to Lady Ella, yet he perceived clearly that a shadow had fallen
between them. She had a wife's extreme sensitiveness to fine

shades of expression and bearing, and manifestly she knew that
something was different. Meanwhile Lady Sunderbund had become a

frequent worshipper in the cathedral, she was a figure as
conspicuous in sombre Princhester as a bird of paradise would

have been; common people stood outside her very very rich blue
door on the chance of seeing her; she never missed an opportunity

of hearing the bishoppreach or speak, she wrote him several
long and thoughtful letters with which he did not bother Lady

Ella, she communicated persistently, and manifestly intended to
become a very active worker in diocesan affairs.

It was inevitable that she and the bishop should meet and talk
occasionally in the cathedral precincts, and it was inevitable

that he should contrast the flexibility of her rapid and very
responsive mind with a certain defensiveness, a stoniness, in the

intellectual bearing of Lady Ella.
If it had been Lady Sunderbund he had had to explain to,

instead of Lady Ella, he could have explained a dozen times a
day.

And since his mind was rehearsing explanations it was not
unnatural they should overflow into this eagerly receptive

channel, and that the less he told Lady Ella the fuller became
his spiritual confidences to Lady Sunderbund.

She was clever in realizing that they were confidences and
treating them as such, more particularly when it chanced that she

and Lady Ella and the bishop found themselves in the same
conversation.

She made great friends with Miriam, and initiated her by a
whole collection of pretty costume plates into the mysteries of

the "Ussian Ballet" and the works of Mousso'gski and "Imsky
Ko'zakof."

The bishop liked a certain religiosity in the texture of
Moussorgski's music, but failed to see the "significance "--of

many of the costumes.
(2)

It was on a Sunday night--the fourth Sunday after Easter--
that the supremecrisis of the bishop's life began. He had had a

feeling all day of extreme dulness and stupidity; he felt his
ministrations unreal, his ceremonies absurd and undignified. In

the night he became bleakly and painfully awake. His mind
occupied itself at first chiefly with the tortuousness and

weakness of his own character. Every day he perceived that the
difficulty of telling Lady Ella of the change in his faith became

more mountainous. And every day he procrastinated. If he had told
her naturally and simply on the evening of his return from London

--before anything material intervened--everything would have
been different, everything would have been simpler....

He groaned and rolled over in his bed.
There came upon him the acutest remorse and misery. For he saw

that amidst these petty immediacies he had lost touch with God.
The last month became incredible. He had seen God. He had touched

God's hand. God had been given to him, and he had neglected the
gift. He was still lost amidst the darkness and loneliness, the

chaotic ends and mean shifts, of an Erastian world. For a month
now and more, after a vision of God so vivid and real and

reassuring that surely no saint nor prophet had ever had a
better, he had made no more than vague responsive movements; he

had allowed himself to be persuaded into an unreasonable and
cowardly delay, and the fetters of association and usage and

minor interests were as unbroken as they had been before ever the
vision shone. Was it credible that there had ever been such a

vision in a life so entirely dictated by immediacy and instinct
as his? We are all creatures of the dark stream, we swim in needs

and bodily impulses and small vanities; if ever and again a
bubble of spiritual imaginativeness glows out of us, it breaks

and leaves us where we were.
"Louse that I am!" he cried.

He still believed in God, without a shadow of doubt; he
believed in the God that he had seen, the high courage, the

golden intention, the light that had for a moment touched him.
But what had he to do with God, he, the loiterer, the little

thing?
He was little, he was funny. His prevarications with his wife,

for example, were comic. There was no other word for him but
"funny."

He rolled back again and lay staring.
"Who will deliver me from the body of this death?" What right

has a little bishop in a purple stock and doeskin breeches, who
hangs back in his palace from the very call of God, to a phrase

so fine and tragic as "the body of this death?"
He was the most unreal thing in the universe. He was a base

insect giving himself airs. What advantage has a bishop over the
Praying Mantis, that cricket which apes the attitude of piety?

Does he matter more--to God?
"To the God of the Universe, who can tell? To the God of man,--

yes."
He sat up in bed struck by his own answer, and full of an

indescribablehunger for God and an indescribable sense of his
complete want of courage to make the one simple appeal that would

satisfy that hunger. He tried to pray. "O God! "he cried,
"forgive me! Take me!" It seemed to him that he was not really

praying but only making believe to pray. It seemed to him that he
was not really existing but only seeming to exist. He seemed to

himself to be one with figures on a china plate, with figures
painted on walls, with the flimsy imagined lives of men in

stories of forgotten times. "O God!" he said, "O God," acting a
gesture, mimicking appeal.

"Anaemic," he said, and was given an idea.