“And yet feeling nearer, infinitely nearer to God,” he said.

“Yes,” she panted; “yes.”

“I thought if one went out, one went out just to doubt and darkness.”

“And you don’t?”

“No.”

“You have gone at one step to a new ’iligion!”

He stared for a moment at the phrase.

“To religion,” he said.

“It is so wondyful,” she said, with her hands straight down upon the couch upon which she was sitting, and leaning forward at him, so as to seem almost as much out of drawing as a modern picture.

“It seems,” he reflected; “—­as if it were a natural thing.”

She came back to earth very slowly.  She turned to the tea-things with hushed and solemn movements as though she administered a ceremony of peculiar significance.  The bishop too rose slowly out of the profundity of his confession.  “No sugar please,” he said, arresting the lump in mid air.

It was only when they were embarked upon cups of tea and had a little refreshed themselves, that she carried the talk further.

“Does it mean that you must leave the church?” she asked.

“It seemed so at first,” he said.  “But now I do not know.  I do not know what I ought to do.”

She awaited his next thought.

“It is as if one had lived in a room all one’s life and thought it the world—­and then suddenly walked out through a door and discovered the sea and the mountains and stars.  So it was with me and the Anglican Church.  It seems so extraordinary now—­and it would have seemed the most natural thing a year ago—­to think that I ever believed that the Anglican Compromise was the final truth of religion, that nothing more until the end of the world could ever be known that Cosmo Gordon Lang did not know, that there could be no conception of God and his quality that Randall Davidson did not possess.”

He paused.

“I did,” he said.

“I did,” she responded with round blue eyes of wonder.

“At the utmost the Church of England is a tabernacle on a road.”

“A ’oad that goes whe’?” she rhetorized.

“Exactly,” said the bishop, and put down his cup.

“You see, my dear Lady Sunderbund,” he resumed, “I am exactly in the same position of that man at the door.”

She quoted aptly and softly:  “The wo’ld was all befo’ them whe’ to choose.”

He was struck by the aptness of the words.

“I feel I have to come right out into the bare truth.  What exactly then do I become?  Do I lose my priestly function because I discover how great God is?  But what am I to do?”

He opened a new layer of his thoughts to her.

“There is a saying,” he remarked, “once a priest, always a priest.  I cannot imagine myself as other than what I am.”

“But o’thodox no maw,” she said.

“Orthodox—­self-satisfied, no longer.  A priest who seeks, an exploring priest.”