“I like you,” the bishop said, “I like you very much.  As you say yourself, I have seen a great deal of you, because I have enjoyed your society, and your views and talk were good and young and fresh, and did me good.  You have served to keep me in touch with the outside world, a world of which I used to know at one time a great deal.  I know your people and I know you, I think, and many people have spoken to me of you.  I see why now.  They, no doubt, understood what was coming better than myself, and were meaning to reassure me concerning you.  And they said nothing but what was good of you.  But there are certain things of which no one can know but yourself, and concerning which no other person, save myself, has a right to question you.  You have promised very fairly for my daughter’s future; you have suggested more than you have said, but I understood.  You can give her many pleasures which I have not been able to afford; she can get from you the means of seeing more of this world in which she lives, of meeting more people, and of indulging in her charities, or in her extravagances, for that matter, as she wishes.  I have no fear of her bodily comfort; her life, as far as that is concerned, will be easier and broader, and with more power for good.  Her future, as I say, as you say also, is assured; but I want to ask you this,” the bishop leaned forward and watched the young man anxiously, “you can protect her in the future, but can you assure me that you can protect her from the past?”

Young Latimer raised his eyes calmly and said, “I don’t think I quite understand.”

“I have perfect confidence, I say,” returned the bishop, “in you as far as your treatment of Ellen is concerned in the future.  You love her and you would do everything to make the life of the woman you love a happy one; but this is it.  Can you assure me that there is nothing in the past that may reach forward later and touch my daughter through you—­no ugly story, no oats that have been sowed, and no boomerang that you have thrown wantonly and that has not returned—­but which may return?”

“I think I understand you now, sir,” said the young man, quietly.  “I have lived,” he began, “as other men of my sort have lived.  You know what that is, for you must have seen it about you at college, and after that before you entered the Church.  I judge so from your friends, who were your friends then, I understand.  You know how they lived.  I never went in for dissipation, if you mean that, because it never attracted me.  I am afraid I kept out of it not so much out of respect for others as for respect for myself.  I found my self-respect was a very good thing to keep, and I rather preferred keeping it and losing several pleasures that other men managed to enjoy, apparently with free consciences.  I confess I used to rather envy them.  It is no particular virtue on my part; the thing struck me as rather more vulgar than wicked, and so I have had no wild oats to speak of; and no woman, if that is what you mean, can write an anonymous letter, and no man can tell you a story about me that he could not tell in my presence.”