“You are wrong, my daughter.  They never finish—­they only begin here.  And my love-story”—­he hesitated and his big fingers spread over the child’s head, “It is all written in Eleanor’s eyes.”

“I hope when mine comes I shall have the luck to hear anything half as pretty as that.  I envy Eleanor,” said the graceful bridesmaid as she took the tea-cup again, but the Bishop did not hear her.

[Illustration:  “Many waters shall not wash out this love,” said Eleanor]

He had turned toward the sea and his eyes wandered out across the geraniums where the shadow of a sun-filled cloud lay over uncounted acres of unhurried waves.  His face was against the little girl’s bright head, and he said something softly to himself, and the child turned her face quickly and smiled at him and repeated the words: 

“Many waters shall not wash out love,” said Eleanor.

THE WITNESSES

The old clergyman sighed and closed the volume of “Browne on The Thirty-nine Articles,” and pushed it from him on the table.  He could not tell what the words meant; he could not keep his mind tense enough to follow an argument of three sentences.  It must be that he was very tired.  He looked into the fire, which was burning badly, and about the bare, little, dusty study, and realized suddenly that he was tired all the way through, body and soul.  And swiftly, by way of the leak which that admission made in the sea-wall of his courage, rushed in an ocean of depression.  It had been a hard, bad day.  Two people had given up their pews in the little church which needed so urgently every ounce of support that held it.  And the junior warden, the one rich man of the parish, had come in before service in the afternoon to complain of the music.  If that knife-edged soprano did not go, he said, he was afraid he should have to go himself; it was impossible to have his nerves scraped to the raw every Sunday.

The old clergyman knew very little about music, but he remembered that his ear had been uncomfortably jarred by sounds from the choir, and that he had turned once and looked at them, and wondered if some one had made a mistake, and who it was.  It must be, then, that dear Miss Barlow, who had sung so faithfully in St. John’s for twenty-five years, was perhaps growing old.  But how could he tell her so; how could he deal such a blow to her kind heart, her simple pride and interest in her work?  He was growing old, too.

His sensitive mouth carved downward as he stared into the smoldering fire, and let himself, for this one time out of many times he had resisted, face the facts.  It was not Miss Barlow and the poor music; it was not that the church was badly heated, as one of the ex-pewholders had said, nor that it was badly situated, as another had claimed; it was something of deeper, wider significance, a broken foundation, that made the ugly, widening crack all through the height of