ith an intensity that amazed her father. And
gradually the Bishop discovered that he detested his paragon of a
son-in-law. But why? It was not jealousy. He really was a paragon, not a
sham. To the Bishop it seemed, and with truth, that any other woman
would have done as well as his daughter, that her husband neither
understood her nor wished to understand her, that he accepted ruthlessly
without knowing that he accepted it, her selfless devotion, that he used
her as a cushion to make his rare moments of leisure more restful, that
her love was not even a source of happiness to him, only a solace. And
she, extraordinary to behold, was radiantly content.

"_Just like her mother over again_," the Bishop had wrathfully said to
himself as he drove away from his daughter's door. And at that moment a
slide was drawn back from his mind, and he saw that the marriage was a
replica of his own, except in so far that his son-in-law, greatly
assisted by circumstances, had actually taken a little trouble to
arrange his marriage for himself, while the Bishop's--what there was of
it--had been done for him by his mother.

Till this morning he had believed his marriage to have been an ideally
happy one, that he had felt all that man can feel; and he had been
inclined to treat as womanish the desperate desolation of men who had
after all only suffered the same bereavement as he had himself, and
which he had quickly overcome. He saw now that he had missed happiness
exactly as his son-in-law was missing it. The same thing had befallen
them both. Love could do there no mighty works because of their
unbelief. When he remembered his wife's face he realised that her joy
had been something beyond his ken. He had not shared it. He had not
known love, even when it had drawn very nigh unto him.

As he waited motionless for Wentworth to come in, his strong, intrepid
mind worked. The Bishop at fifty went to school to a new thought. It was
that power of going to school at fifty to a new thought which had made
his Archbishop, who loved him, give him the See of Lostford, to the
amazement of the demurer clergy who were scandalised by his
unconventionality, and his fearful baldness of speech. They could only
account for the appointment by the fact that he was the son of a duke.
It was that power which made the Bishop seem a much younger man than
Wentworth, who was in reality ten years his junior. The Bishop was still
a learner. He still moved with vigour