One might smoke up the chimney, he reflected.  But he had no cigarettes!  Perhaps if he were to slip downstairs....

Why had he given up smoking?

He groaned aloud.  He and his reflection eyed one another in mutual despair.

There came before his memory the image of a boy’s face, a swarthy little boy, grinning, grinning with a horrible knowingness and pointing his finger—­an accusing finger.  It had been the most exasperating, humiliating, and shameful incident in the bishop’s career.  It was the afternoon for his fortnightly address to the Shop-girls’ Church Association, and he had been seized with a panic fear, entirely irrational and unjustifiable, that he would not be able to deliver the address.  The fear had arisen after lunch, had gripped his mind, and then as now had come the thought, “If only I could smoke!” And he had smoked.  It seemed better to break a vow than fail the Association.  He had fallen to the temptation with a completeness that now filled him with shame and horror.  He had stalked Dunk, his valet-butler, out of the dining-room, had affected to need a book from the book-case beyond the sideboard, had gone insincerely to the sideboard humming “From Greenland’s icy mountains,” and then, glancing over his shoulder, had stolen one of his own cigarettes, one of the fatter sort.  With this and his bedroom matches he had gone off to the bottom of the garden among the laurels, looked everywhere except above the wall to be sure that he was alone, and at last lit up, only as he raised his eyes in gratitude for the first blissful inhalation to discover that dreadful little boy peeping at him from the crotch in the yew-tree in the next garden.  As though God had sent him to be a witness!

Their eyes had met.  The bishop recalled with an agonized distinctness every moment, every error, of that shameful encounter.  He had been too surprised to conceal the state of affairs from the pitiless scrutiny of those youthful eyes.  He had instantly made as if to put the cigarette behind his back, and then as frankly dropped it....

His soul would not be more naked at the resurrection.  The little boy had stared, realized the state of affairs slowly but surely, pointed his finger....

Never had two human beings understood each other more completely.

A dirty little boy!  Capable no doubt of a thousand kindred scoundrelisms.

It seemed ages before the conscience-stricken bishop could tear himself from the spot and walk back, with such a pretence of dignity as he could muster, to the house.

And instead of the discourse he had prepared for the Shop-girls’ Church Association, he had preached on temptation and falling, and how he knew they had all fallen, and how he understood and could sympathize with the bitterness of a secret shame, a moving but unsuitable discourse that had already been subjected to misconstruction and severe reproof in the local press of Princhester.