“You may and you shall!”—­replied Brent, swiftly—­“But think for a moment, before you speak, of what that experience has been!  One great grief has clouded your life—­the loss of your sister.  After that, what has been your lot?  A handful of simple souls set under your charge, in the loveliest of little villages,—­souls that love you, trust you and obey you.  Compared to this, take my daily life!  An over-populated diocese—­misery and starvation on all sides,—­men working for mere pittances,—­women prostituting themselves to obtain food—­children starving—­girls ruined in their teens—­and over it all, my wretched self, a leading representative of the Church which can do nothing to remedy these evils!  And worse than all, a Church in which some of the clergy themselves who come under my rule and dominance are more dishonourable and dissolute than many of the so-called ‘reprobates’ of society whom they are elected to admonish!  I tell you, Walden, I have some men under my jurisdiction whom I should like to see soundly flogged!—­only I am powerless to order the castigation—­and some others who ought to be serving seven years in penal servitude instead of preaching virtue to people a thousand times more virtuous than themselves!”

“I quite believe that!” said Walden, smiling—­“I know one of them!”

The Bishop glanced at him, and laughed.

“You mean Putwood Leveson?” he said—­“He seems a mischievous fool—­ but I don’t suppose there is any real harm in him, is there?”

“Real harm?”—­and John flared up in a blaze of wrath—­“He is the most pernicious scoundrel that ever masqueraded in the guise of a Christian!”

The Bishop paused in his walk up and down, and clasping his hands behind his back, an old habit of his, looked quizzically at his friend.  A smile, kindly and almost boyish, lightened the grey pallor of his worn face.

“Why, John!” he said—­“you are actually in a temper!  Your mental attitude is evidently that of squared fists and ‘Come on!’ What has roused the slumbering lion, eh?”

“It doesn’t need a lion to spring at Leveson,”—­said Walden, contemptuously—­“A sheep would do it!  The tamest cur that ever crawled would have spirit enough to make a dash for a creature so unutterably mean and false and petty!  I may as well admit to you at once that I myself nearly struck him!”

“You did?” And Bishop Brent’s grave dark eyes flashed with a sudden suspicion of laughter.

“I did.  I know it was not Churchman-like,—­I know it was a case of ‘kicking against the pricks.’  But Leveson’s ‘pricks’ are too much like hog’s bristles for me to endure with patience!”

The Bishop assumed a serious demeanour.

“Come, come, let me hear this out!” he said—­“Do you mean to tell me that you—­you, John—­actually struck a brother minister?”

“No—­I do not mean to tell you anything of the kind, my Lord Bishop!” answered Walden, beginning to laugh.  “I say that I ‘nearly’ struck him,—­not quite!  Someone else came on the scene at the critical moment, and did for me what I should certainly have done for myself had I been left to it.  I cannot say I am sorry for the impulse!”