He took no more of Dale’s stuff because he felt bodily sound and slept well.  And he was now a little shy of this potent fluid.  He went down to Princhester the next day, for his compromise of an interval of three months made it seem possible to face his episcopal routine again.  It was only when he was back in his own palace that the full weight of his domestic responsibilities in the discussion of the course he had to take, became apparent.

Lady Ella met him with affection and solicitude.

“I was tired and mentally fagged,” he said.  “A day or so in London had an effect of change.”

She agreed that he looked much better, and remained for a moment or so scrutinizing him with the faint anxiety of one resolved to be completely helpful.

He regarded her with a renewed sense of her grace and dignity and kindliness.  She was wearing a grey dress of soft silky material, touched with blue and covered with what seemed to him very rich and beautiful lace; her hair flowed back very graciously from her broad brow, and about her wrist and neck were delicate lines of gold.  She seemed tremendously at home and right just where she was, in that big hospitable room, cultured but Anglican, without pretensions or novelties, with a glow of bound books, with the grand piano that Miriam, his third daughter, was beginning to play so well, with the tea equipage of shining silver and fine porcelain.

He sat down contentedly in the low armchair beside her.

It wasn’t a setting that one would rashly destroy....

And that evening at dinner this sense of his home as a complex of finely adjusted things not to be rashly disturbed was still more in the mind of the bishop.  At dinner he had all his domesticities about him.  It was the family time, from eight until ten, at which latter hour he would usually go back from the drawing-room to his study.  He surveyed the table.  Eleanor was at home for a few days, looking a little thin and bright but very keen and happy.  She had taken a first in the first part of the Moral Science Tripos, and she was working hard now for part two.  Clementina was to go back to Newnham with her next September.  She aspired to history.  Miriam’s bent was musical.  She and Phoebe and Daphne and Clementina were under the care of skilful Mademoiselle Lafarge, most tactful of Protestant French-women, Protestant and yet not too Protestant, one of those rare French Protestants in whom a touch of Bergson and the Pasteur Monod

     “scarce suspected, animates the whole.”

And also they had lessons, so high are our modern standards of education, from Mr. Blent, a brilliant young mathematician in orders, who sat now next to Lady Ella.  Mr. Whippham, the chaplain, was at the bishop’s right hand, ready for any chance of making arrangements to clear off the small arrears of duty the little holiday in London had accumulated.  The bishop surveyed all these bright young people between