“The Bishop of Silchester?” Mark exclaimed.  “But he’s the last bishop I should expect to help me.”

“On the contrary,” said the Rector, “you have lived in his diocese for more than five years, and if you repair to another bishop, he will certainly wonder why you didn’t go first to the Bishop of Silchester.”

“But I don’t suppose that the Bishop of Silchester is likely to help me,” Mark objected.  “He wasn’t so much enamoured of Rowley as all that, and I don’t gather that he has much affection or admiration for Burrowes.”

“That’s not the point; the point is that you have devoted yourself to the religious life, both informally and formally, in his diocese.  You have shown that you possess some capacity for sticking to it, and I fancy that you will find the Bishop less unsympathetic than you expect.”

However, Mark was not given an opportunity to put the Bishop of Silchester’s good-will to the test, for no sooner had he made up his mind to write to him than the news came that he was seriously ill, so seriously ill that he was not expected to live, which in fact turned out a true prognostication, for on the Feast of St. Philip and St. James the prelate died in his Castle of High Thorpe.  He was succeeded by the Bishop of Warwick, much to Mark’s pleasure and surprise, for the new Bishop was an old friend of Father Rowley and a High Churchman, one who might lend a kindly ear to Mark’s ambition.  Father Rowley had been in the United States for nearly two years, where he had been treated with much sympathy and where he had collected enough money to pay off the debt upon the new St. Agnes’.  He had arrived home about a week before Mark left Malford, and in answer to Mark he wrote immediately to Dr. Oliphant, the new Bishop of Silchester, to enlist his interest.  Early in June Mark received a cordial letter inviting him to visit the Bishop at High Thorpe.

The promotion of Dr. Aylmer Oliphant to the see of Silchester was considered at the time to be an indication that the political party then in power was going mad in preparation for its destruction by the gods.  The Press in commenting upon the appointment did not attempt to cast a slur upon the sanctity and spiritual fervour of the new Bishop, but it felt bound to observe that the presence of such a man on the episcopal bench was an indication that the party in power was oblivious of the existence of an enraged electorate already eager to hurl them out of office.  At a time when thinking men and women were beginning to turn to the leaders of the National Church for a social policy, a government worn out by eight years of office that included a costly war was so little alive to the signs of the times as to select for promotion a prelate conspicuously identified with the obscurantist tactics of that small but noisy group in the Church of England which arrogated to itself the presumptuous claim to be the Catholic party.  Dr. Oliphant’s learning was indisputable; his liturgical knowledge was profound;