never had to shut murder out of your heart when you
heard that he'd given her a hard life and a glad death. Eleanor Gray! Do
you remember how lovely she was, how high-spirited and full of the joy
of life?" The Bishop's great figure was still as if the breath in it had
stopped, but Fielding, carried on the flood of his own rushing feeling,
did not notice. "Do you remember, Jim?" he repeated.

"I remember," the Bishop said, and his voice sounded very quiet.

"Jove! How calm you are!" exploded the other.

"You're a churchman; you live behind a wall, you hear voices through it,
but you can't be in the fight--it's easy for you."

"Life isn't easy for anyone, Dick," said the Bishop, slowly. "You know
that. I'm fighting the current as well as you. You are a churchman as
well as I. If it's my _metier_ to preach against human passion, it's
yours to resist it. You're letting this man you hate mould your
character; you're letting him burn the kindness out of your soul. He's
making you bitter and hard and unjust--and you're letting him. I thought
you had more will--more poise. It isn't your affair what he is, even
what he does, Dick--it's your affair to keep your own judgment unwarped,
your own heart gentle, your own soul untainted by the poison of hatred.
We are both churchmen, as you put it--loyalty is for us both. You live
your sermon--I say mine. I have said it. Now live yours. Put this
wormwood away from you. Forgive Preston, as you need forgiveness at
higher hands. Don't break the girl's heart, and spoil your boy's
life--it may spoil it--the leaven of bitterness works long. You're at a
parting of the ways--take the right turn. Do good and not evil with your
strength; all the rest is nothing. After all the years there is just one
thing that counts, and that our mothers told us when we were little
chaps together--be good, Dick."

The magnetic voice, that had swayed thousands, the indescribable trick
of inflection that caught the heart-strings, the pure, high personality
that shone through look and tone, had never, in all his brilliant
career, been more full of power than for this audience of one. Fielding
got up, trembling, and stood before him.

"Jim," he said, "whatever else is so, you are that--you are a good man.
The trouble is you want me to be as good as you are; and I can't. If you
had had temptations like mine, trials like mine, I might try to follow
you--I would try. But you haven't--you're an impossible model for