Lucy who has to put up with him and not I. I should think even God
Almighty must find him rather difficult to live with at times. And now,
Wentworth, if I am to be up and away at cock-crow, I must go to bed."

But the Bishop did not go to bed at once when Wentworth had escorted him
to his room.

"It was no use," he said to himself. "It was worth trying, but it was no
use. He never saw that he had misjudged me. He met my eye. He has a
straight, clean eye. He is sincere as far as he goes, but how far _does_
he go? He has never made that first step towards sincerity of doubting
his own sincerity. He mistakes his moods for convictions. He has never
suspected his own motives, or turned them inside out. He suspects those
of others instead. He is like a crab. He moves sideways by nature, and
he thinks that everyone else who moves otherwise is not straightforward,
and that he must make allowances for them. According to his lights he
has behaved generously by me. Has he! Damn him! God forgive me. Well, I
must stick to him, for I believe I am almost the only friend he has left
in the world."

CHAPTER XII

Shall soul not somehow pay for soul?--D. G. ROSSETTI.

Fay did not sleep that night.

For a long time past, she seemed to have been gradually, inevitably
approaching, dragging reluctant feet towards something horrible,
unendurable. She could not look this veiled horror in the face. She
never attempted to define it to herself. Her one object was to get away
from it.

It had not sprung into life full grown. It had gradually taken form
after Michael's imprisonment. At first it had been only an uneasy ghost
that could be laid, a spectre across her path that could be avoided; but
since she had come home it had slowly attained gigantic and terrifying
proportions. It loomed before her now as a vague but insistent menace,
from which she could no longer turn away.

A great change was coming over Fay, but she tacitly resisted it. She did
not understand it, nor realise that the menace came from within her
gates, was of the nature of an insurrection in the citadel of self. We
do not always recognise the voice of the rebel soul when first it begins
to speak hoarsely, unintelligibly, urgently from the dark cell to which
we have relegated it.

Some of us are so constituted that we can look back at our past and see
it as a gradation of steps, a sort of sequence, and can thus gain a
kind of inkling of the nature of the nex