elf," laughed Delormais. "The Bishop has
not to be made, nor the palace to be built; the guest-chamber awaits you
with the blue skies and balmy airs of spring. Of all appointments it is
the one I would have chosen. A life of activity, of responsibility and
usefulness; a wide sphere of action; opportunities for doing much good
in public, still more in private. The latter brings the greater
blessing."

"You are a wonderful man," we could not help exclaiming. "Your life
ought to be written. We should love to make it known to the world."

"You shall become my biographer," laughed Delormais, "if you will
undertake it in French. Do what you will with what I have told you
to-night. Only keep to yourself all my ecclesiastical history. That is
sacred and private, at any rate as long as I am living. For the rest,
change names and dates only sufficiently to prevent recognition. Not
that it would matter. My life is my own, as I have said. And not that I
have anything to conceal. My faults, follies and indiscretions have been
those of impulse; of the head, not of the heart, I would fain believe. I
cannot remember the time when I did not at least wish to do well. Of
evil men and deliberate sin I have ever had a wholesome horror. But all
and everything by God's grace, not of my own strength."

At that moment we were startled by a cry in the street: the well-known
call of El sereno.

"Another watchman," cried Delormais. "What is the hour?"

We had not thought of time. A few months earlier and the sun would long
have been up. Want of space prevents our giving more than a mere outline
of Delormais' life. He filled in an infinite number of details
impossible to be recorded here. They would swell to a volume, but a
volume of singular interest. He spoke rapidly and with few pauses. Our
watches marked the hour of five. It was that period of the night when
darkness is greatest before dawn. The watchman's voice cried the hour
and the starry night for the last time.

"For your own sake I must break up the assembly," laughed Delormais.
"Two hours' sleep will refresh us both. Presently we shall meet again.
See! our candles wax dim and blue--or is it fancy? This is a ghostly
house, you know. My great-grandmother was Spanish, and for all I can
tell some of its ancestors and mine may have met here in times long past
and played out their comedies and tragedies together. As we are playing
ours."

We parted. Sleep came to us, but scarcely uncon