cy, or a great discovery, or a passion, or a vocation. He hated
transformations, new births, all change. His friends at first rallied
him unmercifully, then lost patience, and finally fell from him, one by
one. Some openly left him, the more good-natured among them forgot him,
and if by chance they found themselves in his society, hurried back with
affectionate cordiality to reminiscences of school and college life,
long-passed milestones before the parting of the ways.

The Bishop when he plunged into his work also for a time lost sight of
Wentworth, but when he was appointed to the See of Lostford, within
five miles of Barford, the two men resumed, at first with alacrity,
something of the old intercourse.

Wentworth had an element of faithfulness in him which enabled him to
take up a friendship after a long interval, but it was on one condition,
namely that the friend had remained _plante la_ where he had been left.
If in the meanwhile the friend had moved, the friendship flagged.

It was soon apparent that the Bishop had not by any means remained
_plante la_, and the friendship quickly drooped. It would long since
have died a natural death if it had not been kept alive by the Bishop
himself, a man of robust affections and strong compassions, without a
moment to spend on small resentments. After Michael's imprisonment he
had redoubled his efforts to keep in touch with Wentworth, and the great
grief of the latter, silently and nobly endured, had been a bond between
the two men which even a miserable incident which must have severed most
friendships had served to loosen, not to break.

The Bishop had in truth arrived at Barford, and was now sitting
apparently unoccupied by the library fire. To be unoccupied even for an
instant except during recuperative sleep was so unusual with the Bishop,
so unprecedented, that his daughter would have been terrified could she
have seen him at that moment. He had only parted from her and her
husband at mid-day, yet it was a sudden thought suggested by his visit
to them which was now holding him motionless by the fire, his lean
person bulging with unanswered letters.

The Bishop was a small ugly man of fifty, unconventional to the core,
the younger son of a duke, and a clergyman by personal conviction. He
had been born in a hurry, and had remained in a hurry ever since. He had
neither great administrative capacities, nor profound scholarship, but
what powers he had were eked out by