of a duty
undone, which he could not make up his mind to do. Over and over he
heard his friend's agitated voice. "If you had had temptations like
mine, trials like mine, I would try to follow you," it said. He knew
that the man would be good as his word. He could perhaps win Dick's
happiness for him if he would pick up the gauntlet of that speech. If he
could bring himself to tell Fielding the whole story that he had shut so
long ago into silence--that he, too, had cared for Eleanor Gray, and had
given her up in a harder way than the other, for the Bishop had made it
possible that the Southerner should marry her. But it was like tearing
his soul to do it. No one but his mother, who was dead, had known this
one secret of a life like crystal. The Bishop's reticence was the
intense sort, that often goes with a frank exterior, and he had never
cared for another woman. Some men's hearts are open pleasure-grounds,
where all the world may come and go, and the earth is dusty with many
feet; and some are like theatres, shut perhaps to the world in general,
but which a passport of beauty or charm may always open; and with many,
of finer clay, there are but two or three ways into a guarded temple,
and only the touchstone of quality may let pass the lightest foot upon
the carefully tended sod. But now and then a heart is Holy of Holies.
Long ago the Bishop, lifting a young face from the books that absorbed
him, had seen a girl's figure filling the narrow doorway, and dazzled by
the radiance of it, had placed that image on the lonely altar, where the
flame waited, before unconsecrated. Then the girl had gone, and he had
quietly shut the door and lived his life outside. But the sealed place
was there, and the fire burned before the old picture. Why should he,
for Dick Fielding, for any one, let the light of day upon that
stillness? The one thing in life that was his own, and all these years
he had kept it sacred--why should he? Fiercely, with the old animal
jealousy of ownership, he guarded for himself that memory--what was
there on earth that could make him share it? And in answer there rose
before him the vision of Madge Preston, with a haunting air of her
mother about her; of young Dick Fielding, almost his own child from
babyhood, his honest soul torn between two duties; of old Dick Fielding,
loyal and kind and obstinate, his stubborn feet, the feet that had
walked near his for forty years, needing only a touch to turn them into
t