which a man like him could
never have stooped to?"

"It is he who has cut himself adrift from me," said Wentworth icily. "I
have not changed."

"That is just it. A slight change, shall we say expansion on your part,
might have enabled you to"--the Bishop chose his words as carefully as a
doctor counts drops into a medicine glass--"to keep pace with him?"

"I do not regard friendship as a race or a combat of wits," said
Wentworth. "Friendship is to my mind something sacred. I hope I can
remain Grenfell's friend without believing him to be absolutely
faultless. If he is so unreasonable as to expect that of me, which I
should not for a moment expect of him, why then----" Wentworth shrugged
his shoulders.

One of the few friends who had not drifted from him looked at him with
somewhat pained affection.

Why does a life dwelt apart from others tend to destroy first generosity
and then tenderness in man and woman? Why does one so often find a
certain hardness and inhumanity encrusting those who have withdrawn
themselves behind the shutters of their own convenience, or is it, after
all, their own impotence?

"Has he always been hard and cold by nature?" said the Bishop to
himself, "and is the real man showing himself in middle age, or is his
meagre life starving him?"

He tried again.

"You nearly lost my friendship a year ago by attributing a sordid motive
to me, Wentworth."

Wentworth understood instantly.

"That is all past and forgotten," he said quickly. "I never think of it.
Have I ever allowed it to make the slightest difference?"

"No," said the Bishop, looking hard at him, "and for that matter neither
have I. We have never talked the matter out. Let us do so now. I don't
suppose you have forgotten the odium I incurred over the living of
Rambury. It had been held for generations by old men. It had become a
kind of clerical almshouse. When it fell vacant there was of course yet
another elderly cleric----"

"My uncle," said Wentworth, "a most excellent man."

"Just so, but in failing health. Rightly or wrongly I was convinced that
it was my duty to give the place a chance by putting there a younger
man, of energy and capacity for hard work. I gave it to my future
son-in-law as you know."

Wentworth nodded. "Everyone said at the time he was an excellent man,"
he said with evident desire to be fair.

"I daresay, but that is not the point. The point is that I had no idea
that iron traction engine wante