The “fairyland of science and the long results of time,” passing from the Bishop’s hands into the child’s, were turned into such graphic tales, for Eleanor, with all her airy charm, struck straight from the shoulder.  Never was there a sense of superiority on the Bishop’s side, or of being lectured on Eleanor’s.

“Why do you like to walk with the Bishop?” Mrs. Vail asked, curiously.

“Because he hasn’t any morals,” said the little girl, fresh from a Sunday-school lesson.

Saturday night Mr. Fielding stayed late in the city, and Dick was with his lady-love at the Vails; so the Bishop, after dining alone, went down on the wide beach below the house and walked, as he smoked his cigar.  Through the week he had been restless under the constant prick of a duty undone, which he could not make up his mind to do.  Over and over he heard his friend’s agitated voice.  “If you had had temptations like mine, trials like mine, I would try to follow you,” it said.  He knew that the man would be good as his word.  He could perhaps win Dick’s happiness for him if he would pick up the gauntlet of that speech.  If he could bring himself to tell Fielding the whole story that he had shut so long ago into silence—­that he, too, had cared for Eleanor Gray, and had given her up in a harder way than the other, for the Bishop had made it possible that the Southerner should marry her.  But it was like tearing his soul to do it.  No one but his mother, who was dead, had known this one secret of a life like crystal.  The Bishop’s reticence was the intense sort, that often goes with a frank exterior, and he had never cared for another woman.  Some men’s hearts are open pleasure-grounds, where all the world may come and go, and the earth is dusty with many feet; and some are like theatres, shut perhaps to the world in general, but which a passport of beauty or charm may always open; and with many, of finer clay, there are but two or three ways into a guarded temple, and only the touchstone of quality may let pass the lightest foot upon the carefully tended sod.  But now and then a heart is Holy of Holies.  Long ago the Bishop, lifting a young face from the books that absorbed him, had seen a girl’s figure filling the narrow doorway, and dazzled by the radiance of it, had placed that image on the lonely altar, where the flame waited, before unconsecrated.  Then the girl had gone, and he had quietly shut the door and lived his life outside.  But the sealed place was there, and the fire burned before the old picture.  Why should he, for Dick Fielding, for any one, let the light of day upon that stillness?  The one thing in life that was his own, and all these years he had kept it sacred—­why should he?  Fiercely, with the old animal jealousy of ownership, he guarded for himself that memory—­what was there on earth that could make him share it?  And in answer there rose before him the vision of Madge Preston, with a haunting air of her mother about her; of young Dick Fielding, almost his own child from babyhood, his honest soul torn between two duties; of old Dick Fielding, loyal and kind and obstinate, his stubborn feet, the feet that had walked near his for forty years, needing only a touch to turn them into the right path.