making you bitter and hard and unjust—­and you’re letting him.  I thought you had more will—­more poise.  It isn’t your affair what he is, even what he does, Dick—­it’s your affair to keep your own judgment unwarped, your own heart gentle, your own soul untainted by the poison of hatred.  We are both churchmen, as you put it—­loyalty is for us both.  You live your sermon—­I say mine.  I have said it.  Now live yours.  Put this wormwood away from you.  Forgive Preston, as you need forgiveness at higher hands.  Don’t break the girl’s heart, and spoil your boy’s life—­it may spoil it—­the leaven of bitterness works long.  You’re at a parting of the ways—­take the right turn.  Do good and not evil with your strength; all the rest is nothing.  After all the years there is just one thing that counts, and that our mothers told us when we were little chaps together—­be good, Dick.”

The magnetic voice, that had swayed thousands, the indescribable trick of inflection that caught the heart-strings, the pure, high personality that shone through look and tone, had never, in all his brilliant career, been more full of power than for this audience of one.  Fielding got up, trembling, and stood before him.

“Jim,” he said, “whatever else is so, you are that—­you are a good man.  The trouble is you want me to be as good as you are; and I can’t.  If you had had temptations like mine, trials like mine, I might try to follow you—­I would try.  But you haven’t—­you’re an impossible model for me.  You want me to be an angel of light, and I’m only—­a man.”  He turned and went into the house.

The oldest inhabitant had not seen a devotion like the Bishop’s and Eleanor’s.  There was in it no condescension on one side, no strain on the other.  The soul that through fulness of life and sorrow and happiness and effort had reached at last a child’s peace met as its like the little child’s soul, that had known neither life nor sorrow nor conscious happiness, and was without effort as a lily of the field.  It may be that the wisdom of babyhood and the wisdom of age will look very alike to us when we have the wisdom of eternity.  And as all the colors of the spectrum make sunlight, so all his splendid powers that patient years had made perfect shone through the Bishop’s character in the white light of simplicity.  No one knew what they talked about, the child and the man, on the long walks that they took together almost every day, except from Eleanor’s conversation after.  Transmigration, done into the vernacular, and applied with startling directness, was evidently a fascinating subject from the first.  She brought back as well a vivid and epigrammatic version of the nebular hypothesis.

“Did you hear ’bout what the world did?” she demanded, casually, at the lunch-table.  “We were all hot, nasty steam, just like a tea-kettle, and we cooled off into water, sailin’ around so much, and then we got crusts on us, bless de Lawd, and then, sir, we kept on gettin’ solid, and circus animals grewed all over us, and then they died, and thank God for that, and Adam and Evenin’ camed, and Madge can’t I have some more gingerbread?  I’d just as soon be a little sick if you’ll let me have it.”