object in a scene of the most exquisite
and delicate colour. Right and left of him stretched the low grey salted
shore, pale banks of marly earth surmounted by green-grey wiry grass
that held and was half buried in fine blown sand. Above, the heavens
made a complete hemisphere of blue in which a series of remote cumulus
clouds floated and dissolved. Before him spread the long levels of the
sands, and far away at its utmost ebb was the sea. Eleanor had gone to
explore the black ribs of a wrecked fishing-boat that lay at the edge of
a shallow lagoon. She was a little pink-footed figure, very bright
and apparently transparent. She had reverted for a time to shameless
childishness; she had hidden her stockings among the reeds of the bank,
and she was running to and fro, from star-fish to razor shell and from
cockle to weed. The shingle was pale drab and purple close at hand, but
to the westward, towards Hunstanton, the sands became brown and
purple, and were presently broken up into endless skerries of low flat
weed-covered boulders and little intensely blue pools. The sea was
a band of sapphire that became silver to the west; it met the silver
shining sands in one delicate breathing edge of intensely white foam.
Remote to the west, very small and black and clear against the afternoon
sky, was a cart, and about it was a score or so of mussel-gatherers.
A little nearer, on an apparently empty stretch of shining wet sand, a
multitude of gulls was mysteriously busy. These two groups of activities
and Eleanor's flitting translucent movements did but set off and
emphasize the immense and soothing tranquillity.

For a long time the bishop sat passively receptive to this healing
beauty. Then a little flow of thought began and gathered in his mind. He
had come out to think over two letters that he had brought with him.
He drew these now rather reluctantly from his pocket, and after a long
pause over the envelopes began to read them.

He reread Likeman's letter first.

Likeman could not forgive him.

"My dear Scrope," he wrote, "your explanation explains nothing. This
sensational declaration of infidelity to our mother church, made under
the most damning and distressing circumstances in the presence of young
and tender minds entrusted to your ministrations, and in defiance of the
honourable engagements implied in the confirmation service, confirms my
worst apprehensions of the weaknesses of your character. I have always
felt th