Latimer sat for some time silent, until indeed, his silence assumed such a significance that he raised his head impatiently and said with a motion of the hand, “I mean to answer you in a minute; I want to be sure that I understand.”

The bishop bowed his head in assent, and for a still longer period the men sat motionless.  The clock in the corner seemed to tick more loudly, and the dead coals dropping in the grate had a sharp, aggressive sound.  The notes of the piano that had risen from the room below had ceased.

“If I understand you,” said Latimer, finally, and his voice and his face as he raised it were hard and aggressive, “you are stating a purely hypothetical case.  You wish to try me by conditions which do not exist, which cannot exist.  What justice is there, what right is there, in asking me to say how I would act under circumstances which are impossible, which lie beyond the limit of human experience?  You cannot judge a man by what he would do if he were suddenly robbed of all his mental and moral training and of the habit of years.  I am not admitting, understand me, that if the conditions which you suggest did exist that I would do one whit differently from what I will do if they remain as they are.  I am merely denying your right to put such a question to me at all.  You might just as well judge the shipwrecked sailors on a raft who eat each other’s flesh as you would judge a sane, healthy man who did such a thing in his own home.  Are you going to condemn men who are ice-locked at the North Pole, or buried in the heart of Africa, and who have given up all thought of return and are half mad and wholly without hope, as you would judge ourselves?  Are they to be weighed and balanced as you and I are, sitting here within the sound of the cabs outside and with a bake-shop around the corner?  What you propose could not exist, could never happen.  I could never be placed where I should have to make such a choice, and you have no right to ask me what I would do or how I would act under conditions that are superhuman—­you used the word yourself—­where all that I have held to be good and just and true would be obliterated.  I would be unworthy of myself, I would be unworthy of your daughter, if I considered such a state of things for a moment, or if I placed my hopes of marrying her on the outcome of such a test, and so, sir,” said the young man, throwing back his head, “I must refuse to answer you.”

The bishop lowered his hand from before his eyes and sank back wearily into his chair.  “You have answered me,” he said.

“You have no right to say that,” cried the young man, springing to his feet.  “You have no right to suppose anything or to draw any conclusions.  I have not answered you.”  He stood with his head and shoulders thrown back, and with his hands resting on his hips and with the fingers working nervously at his waist.

“What you have said,” replied the bishop, in a voice that had changed strangely, and which was inexpressibly sad and gentle, “is merely a curtain of words to cover up your true feeling.  It would have been so easy to have said, ’For thirty days or for life Ellen is the only woman who has the power to make me happy.’  You see that would have answered me and satisfied me.  But you did not say that,” he added, quickly, as the young man made a movement as if to speak.