gently pushed from behind by
Fraeulein's thin hand. Boulou followed. The door was closed again
immediately, almost on Boulou's tail.

The Bishop and Regie looked hard at each other.

"I send my love to Auntie Hester," said Regie, in his catechism voice,
"and I am quite well."

"I should like to have some conversation with Regie alone," said the
Bishop.

Mrs. Gresley wavered, but the Bishop's eye remained fixed on Mr.
Gresley, and the latter led his wife away. The door was left ajar, but
the Bishop closed it. Then he sat down by the fire and held out his
hand.

Regie went up to him fearlessly, and stood between his knees. The two
faces were exactly on the same level. Boulou sat down before the fire,
his tail uncurling in the heat.

"Auntie Hester is very sorry," said the Bishop. "She is so sorry that
she can't even cry."

"Tell her not to mind," said Regie.

"It's no good telling her. Does your arm hurt much?"

"I don't know. Mother says it does, and Fraeulein says it doesn't. But it
isn't that."

"What is it, then?"

"It isn't that, or the 'tato being lost, it was only crumbs afterwards;
but, Mr. Bishop, _I hadn't done nothing_."

Regie looked into the kind keen eyes, and his own little red ones filled
again with tears.

"I had not done nothing," he repeated. "And I'd kept my 'tato for her.
It's that--that--I don't mind about my arm. I'm Christian soldiers about
my arm; but it's that--that--"

"That hurts you in your heart," said the Bishop, putting his arm round
him.

"Yes," said Regie, producing a tight little ball that had once been a
handkerchief. "Auntie Hester and I were such friends. I told her all my
secrets, and she told me hers. I knew long before, when she gave father
the silver cream-jug, and about Fraeulein's muff. If it was a mistake,
like father treading on my foot at the school-feast, I should not mind,
but she did it on purpose."

The Bishop's brow contracted. Time was ebbing away, ebbing away like a
life. Yet Dr. Brown's warning remained in his ears. "If the child is
frightened of her, and screams when he sees her, I won't answer for the
consequences."

"Is that your little dog?" he said, after a moment's thought.

"Yes, that is Boulou."

"Was he ever in a trap?" asked the Bishop, with a vague recollection of
the ways of clergymen's dogs, those "little rifts within the lute,"
which so often break the harmony between a sporting squire and his
clergyman.

"He was once. Mr.