ls to the true faith that lay behind them. That
they knew lay behind them. She didn't know if he had read "The Light
under the Altar"?

"He's vicar of Wombash--in my diocese," said the bishop with restraint.

"It's wonde'ful stuff," said Lady Sunderbund. "It's spi'tually cold,
but it's intellectually wonde'ful. But we want that with spi'tuality. We
want it so badly. If some one--"

She became daring. She bit her under lip and flashed her spirit at him.

"If you--" she said and paused.

"Could think aloud," said the bishop.

"Yes," she said, nodding rapidly, and became breathless to hear.

It would certainly be an astonishing end to the Chasters difficulty if
the bishop went over to the heretic, the bishop reflected.

"My dear lady, I won't disguise," he began; "in fact I don't see how
I could, that for some years I have been growing more and more
discontented with some of our most fundamental formulae. But it's been
very largely a shapeless discontent--hitherto. I don't think I've said a
word to a single soul. No, not a word. You are the first person to
whom I've ever made the admission that even my feelings are at times
unorthodox."

She lit up marvellously at his words. "Go on," she whispered.

But she did not need to tell him to go on. Now that he had once broached
the casket of his reserves he was only too glad of a listener. He talked
as if they were intimate and loving friends, and so it seemed to both
of them they were. It was a wonderful release from a long and painful
solitude.

To certain types it is never quite clear what has happened to them until
they tell it. So that now the bishop, punctuated very prettily by
Lady Sunderbund, began to measure for the first time the extent of his
departure from the old innate convictions of Otteringham Rectory. He
said that it was strange to find doubt coming so late in life, but
perhaps it was only in recent years that his faith had been put to any
really severe tests. It had been sheltered and unchallenged.

"This fearful wa'," Lady Sunderbund interjected.

But Princhester had been a critical and trying change, and "The Light
under the Altar" case had ploughed him deeply. It was curious that
his doubts always seemed to have a double strand; there was a moral
objection based on the church's practical futility and an intellectual
strand subordinated to this which traced that futility largely to its
unconvincing formulae.

"And yet you know," said the bisho