he told Lady Ella the fuller became his spiritual confidences to Lady
Sunderbund.

She was clever in realizing that they were confidences and treating them
as such, more particularly when it chanced that she and Lady Ella and
the bishop found themselves in the same conversation.

She made great friends with Miriam, and initiated her by a whole
collection of pretty costume plates into the mysteries of the "Ussian
Ballet" and the works of Mousso'gski and "Imsky Ko'zakof."

The bishop liked a certain religiosity in the texture of Moussorgski's
music, but failed to see the "significance "--of many of the costumes.

(2)

It was on a Sunday night--the fourth Sunday after Easter--that the
supreme crisis of the bishop's life began. He had had a feeling all day
of extreme dulness and stupidity; he felt his ministrations unreal, his
ceremonies absurd and undignified. In the night he became bleakly and
painfully awake. His mind occupied itself at first chiefly with the
tortuousness and weakness of his own character. Every day he perceived
that the difficulty of telling Lady Ella of the change in his faith
became more mountainous. And every day he procrastinated. If he had
told her naturally and simply on the evening of his return from
London--before anything material intervened--everything would have been
different, everything would have been simpler....

He groaned and rolled over in his bed.

There came upon him the acutest remorse and misery. For he saw that
amidst these petty immediacies he had lost touch with God. The last
month became incredible. He had seen God. He had touched God's hand. God
had been given to him, and he had neglected the gift. He was still lost
amidst the darkness and loneliness, the chaotic ends and mean shifts,
of an Erastian world. For a month now and more, after a vision of God so
vivid and real and reassuring that surely no saint nor prophet had ever
had a better, he had made no more than vague responsive movements; he
had allowed himself to be persuaded into an unreasonable and cowardly
delay, and the fetters of association and usage and minor interests
were as unbroken as they had been before ever the vision shone. Was it
credible that there had ever been such a vision in a life so entirely
dictated by immediacy and instinct as his? We are all creatures of the
dark stream, we swim in needs and bodily impulses and small vanities; if
ever and again a bubble of spiritual imaginativeness glow