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 the touch of theatricality in your temperament, the peculiar craving to be pseudo-deeper, pseudo-simpler than us all, the need of personal excitement.  I know that you were never quite contented to believe in God at second-hand.  You wanted to be taken notice of—­personally.  Except for some few hints to you, I have never breathed a word of these doubts to any human being; I have always hoped that the ripening that comes with years and experience would give you an increasing strength against the dangers of emotionalism and against your strong, deep, quiet sense of your exceptional personal importance....”

The bishop read thus far, and then sat reflecting.

Was it just?

He had many weaknesses, but had he this egotism?  No; that wasn’t the justice of the case.  The old man, bitterly disappointed, was endeavouring to wound.  Scrope asked himself whether he was to blame for that disappointment.  That was a more difficult question....

He dismissed the charge at last, crumpled up the letter in his hand, and after a moment’s hesitation flung it away....  But he remained acutely sorry, not so much for himself as for the revelation of Likeman this letter made.  He had had a great affection for Likeman and suddenly it was turned into a wound.

(3)

The second letter was from Lady Sunderbund, and it was an altogether more remarkable document.  Lady Sunderbund wrote on a notepaper that was evidently the result of a perverse research, but she wrote a letter far more coherent than her speech, and without that curious falling away of the r’s that flavoured even her gravest observations with an unjust faint aroma of absurdity.  She wrote with a thin pen in a rounded boyish handwriting.  She italicized with slashes of the pen.

He held this letter in both hands between his knees, and considered it now with an expression that brought his eyebrows forward until they almost met, and that tucked in the corners of his mouth.

“My dear Bishop,” it began.