But the haunting thing in the bishop’s memory was the face and gesture of the little boy.  That grubby little finger stabbed him to the heart.

“Oh, God!” he groaned.  “The meanness of it!  How did I bring myself—?”

He turned out the light convulsively, and rolled over in the bed, making a sort of cocoon of himself.  He bored his head into the pillow and groaned, and then struggled impatiently to throw the bed-clothes off himself.  Then he sat up and talked aloud.

“I must go to Brighton-Pomfrey,” he said.  “And get a medical dispensation.  If I do not smoke—­”

He paused for a long time.

Then his voice sounded again in the darkness, speaking quietly, speaking with a note almost of satisfaction.

“I shall go mad.  I must smoke or I shall go mad.”

For a long time he sat up in the great bed with his arms about his knees.

(5)

Fearful things came to him; things at once dreadfully blasphemous and entirely weak-minded.

The triangle and the eye became almost visible upon the black background of night.  They were very angry.  They were spinning round and round faster and faster.  Because he was a bishop and because really he did not believe fully and completely in the Trinity.  At one and the same time he did not believe in the Trinity and was terrified by the anger of the Trinity at his unbelief....  He was afraid.  He was aghast....  And oh! he was weary....

He rubbed his eyes.

“If I could have a cup of tea!” he said.

Then he perceived with surprise that he had not thought of praying.  What should he say?  To what could he pray?

He tried not to think of that whizzing Triangle, that seemed now to be nailed like a Catherine wheel to the very centre of his forehead, and yet at the same time to be at the apex of the universe.  Against that—­for protection against that—­he was praying.  It was by a great effort that at last he pronounced the words: 

“Lighten our darkness, we beseech Thee, O Lord ....”

Presently he had turned up his light, and was prowling about the room.  The clear inky dinginess that comes before the raw dawn of a spring morning, found his white face at the window, looking out upon the great terrace and the park.

CHAPTER THE SECOND — THE WEAR AND TEAR OF EPISCOPACY

(1)

It was only in the last few years that the bishop had experienced these nervous and mental crises.  He was a belated doubter.  Whatever questionings had marked his intellectual adolescence had either been very slight or had been too adequately answered to leave any serious scars upon his convictions.