She waylaid him after tea on the stairs.

"Father," she said timidly, as he was passing on in silence.

"Well, Ingeborg?" said the Bishop, pausing and gravely attentive.

"I—want to tell you how sorry I am."

"Yes, Ingeborg?"

"So sorry, so ashamed that I—I went away like that on that tour. It was very wrong of me. And I went with your money. Oh, it was ugly. I—hope you'll forgive me, father?"

"Freely, Ingeborg. It would be sad indeed if I lagged behind our Great Exemplar in the matter of forgiveness."

"Then—I may come back to work?"

"When you tell me you have broken off your clandestine engagement."

"But father—"

"There are no buts, Ingeborg."

"But you said in your sermon—"

The Bishop passed on.

In her eagerness Ingeborg put her hand detainingly on his sleeve, a familiarity hitherto unheard of in that ordered and temperate household.

"But your sermon—you said in your sermon, father—why, how can free forgiveness have conditions? They didn't do it that way in the Bible"—(this to him who was by the very nature of his high office a specialist in forgiveness; poor girl, poor girl)—"You said yourself about the Prodigal Son—his father forgave everything, and perhaps he'd done worse things even than going to Lucerne—"

"We are not told, Ingeborg, of any clandestine engagement," said the Bishop, pursuing his way hampered but, as he was glad to remember afterwards, calm.

"But you know about it—how can it be clandestine when you know about it?"

"Once more, Ingeborg, there are no buts."

"But why shouldn't I marry a good man?"

She was actually following him up quite a number of the stairs, still with her hand on his arm, and her face, so unattractive in its unwomanly eagerness, quite close to his.

"Why should I have to be forgiven for wanting to marry a good man? Everybody marries good men. Mother did, and you never told her she wasn't to. Oh, oh—" she went on, as his dressing-room door was quietly closed upon her, "that isn't free forgiveness at all—it isn't what you said—it isn't what you said—it's conditions."...

And her voice from the doormat became quite a cry, regardless of possible listening Wilsons.

How glad he was that he had been able to put her aside quietly and get himself, still controlled, into his dressing-room. How strange and new were these reckless outbreaks of unreserve. And her reasoning, how wholly deplorable. She wished, unhappy girl, to enjoy the advantages and privileges of the forgiven state while continuing in the sin that had procured the forgiveness. She wished, he reflected, though in educated language, to eat her cake and have it, too. Yet was it not clear that a free forgiveness could only be bestowed on an unlimited penitence? There could be no reservations of particular branches of sin. All must be lopped. And the East Prussian pastor was a branch that must be lopped with the cleanest final cut before real submission could be said to have set in.

But the Bishop in his dressing-room, though he retained his apparent calm, was sore within him. His sermon had failed. The girl must be a stone. It wasn't, he thought profoundly worried, as if he hadn't given her nearly a week for undisturbed thought and hadn't approached her that day with all the helpfulness in his power from the pulpit. Both these things he had done; and she was no nearer recovery than before. Was training then nothing? Was environment nothing? Was blood nothing? Was the blood of bishops, that blood which of all bloods must surely be most potent in preventing its inheritors in all their doings, nothing?

On the following afternoon there was a party at the Palace, arranged by Mrs. Bullivant in the confident days before she knew what Ingeborg was really like. It was a congratulatory party for Judith, and all Redchester and all the county had been invited. Nothing could stop this party but a death in the household—any death, even Richards' might do, but nothing short of death, thought the afflicted lady, wondering how she was to get through the afternoon; and as she crept on to her sofa at a quarter to four to be put by Richards into the final folds and knew that as four struck a great surge of friends would pour in over her and that for three hours she would have to be bright and happy about Judith, and sympathetically explanatory about Ingeborg—who looked altogether too odd to be explained only by a long past dentist—she felt so very low that she was unable to stop herself from thinking it was a pity people didn't die a little oftener. Especially maids. Especially maids who were being so clumsy with the cushions....

And the Master of Ananias had been there since before luncheon, and how exhausting that was. She had had to do most of the entertaining of him, the Bishop being unavoidably absent from the meal, and Ingeborg, who did the conversation in that family, not being able to now because she was in disgrace, and Judith, dear child, never saying much at any time. And the Master had been very exuberant; and his vitality, delightful of course but just a little overwhelming at his age, had reminded her that she needed care. How difficult it had been to get him out into the garden, to somewhere where she wasn't. She hadn't got him there till half-past two, by which time he had been vital without stopping since twelve, and even then she had had to invent a pear-tree in full blossom that she wasn't at all sure about, and tell him she had heard it was a wonderful sight and ought not to be missed. But how difficult it had been. Judith had not seemed to want to show him the pear-tree, and he would not go and look at it unless she went, too. Judith had gone at last, but with an expression on her face as though she thought she was going to have to bear things, and no girl should show a thought like that before marriage. And then there had been an immense number of small matters to see to because of the party, matters Ingeborg had always seen to but couldn't now because she was in disgrace, and how difficult all that was. Still, Mrs. Bullivant felt deeply if vaguely that nobody temporarily evil should be allowed to minister to anybody permanently good. Such persons, she felt, should be put aside into a place made roomy for repentance by the clearing out of all claims. During the whole of the week since her daughter's return she had not let her even pour out tea, either when the riven family was by itself or when congratulatory callers came. "Poor Ingeborg isn't very well," she had murmured, quenching the inquisitiveness natural to callers. She had made up her mind that first evening, when the full horror of what her daughter had done became clear to her, that she would ask nothing of her, not even tea.

But it did make difficulties. She felt entirely low, quite damp with the exertion of meeting them, when she crept into position on the sofa at a quarter to four and waited with closed eyes for the next wave of life that would wash over her. And it all happened as she had feared—she was perpetually having to explain Ingeborg. Guest after guest came up with the expressions of rejoicing proper to guests invited to rejoice over Judith, and the smiling laudations of what was indeed a vision of beauty each ended with a question about Ingeborg. What had she been doing?—(the awful innocence of the question)—how perfectly miserably seedy she looked; poor little Ingeborg; was it really just that tiresome tooth?

Mrs. Bullivant, as she murmured what she could in reply to this ceaseless flow of sympathy from the retired officers and their wives and daughters, and the cathedral dignitaries and their wives and daughters, and the wives and daughters of the county who came without their men because their men wouldn't come, felt vaguely but deeply that it was somehow wrong that Ingeborg should both sin and be sympathised with. She had no right, her injured mother felt, to look so small and stricken. Her family had quite properly removed her outside the pale of their affection till she should announce her broken-off engagement to that dreadful German and ask to be forgiven for ever having been engaged at all, but she ought not to look like somebody who is outside a pale. She seemed positively to be advertising the pale. It was bad taste. It was really the worst of taste when you were the sinner to look like the sinned against; to look ill-used; to droop openly. Yet never could a girl who had done such horrible, such detestably deceitful and vulgar things, have been treated so gently by her family. It had been, Mrs. Bullivant felt, the only good thing in a wretched affair, the perfect breeding with which the Bullivants had met the situation. Not one of them had even remotely alluded to the scene she had made the first afternoon. No one had questioned her, no one had troubled her in any way. She had been left quite free, and no one had exacted the smallest sacrifice of her time to any of their needs. Her father had given her a complete holiday, not allowing her at all in his study, and whenever she had attempted to do anything for her mother or in the house Richards had been rung for. Judith, dear child, seemed instinctively to do the right thing, and without a word from her mother avoided Ingeborg; she was so delicate about it, so fine in her feeling that here was something not quite nice, that she turned red each time Ingeborg during the first day or two tried to talk to her, and quietly went into another room. All the last part of the week Ingeborg had spent in the garden, quite free, quite undisturbed, not a claim on her. And yet here she was, standing about at the party or sitting alone in foolish corners, thin, and pale, and unsmiling, like a reproach.

Through a gap in the crowd Mrs. Bullivant presently saw her being talked to by one who had once been a general but now in retirement wreaked his disciplines on bees. She just had time to notice how her daughter started and flushed when this man suddenly addressed her—such bad manners to start and flush—before the crowd closed again. She shut her eyes for a moment and felt very helpless. Who knew to what lengths Ingeborg's bad manners might not go, and what she might not be saying to the man?

What the general was telling her, with the hearty kindliness fathers of other daughters use to daughters of other fathers—will use, indeed, commented the Bishop observing the incident from afar and allowing himself the solace of an instant's bitterness, to any created female thing if only she will oblige them by not being their own—was that he couldn't have her looking like this.

"Oh, like what?" asked Ingeborg quickly, starting and flushing; for her week as an outcast had lowered her vitality to such an extent that she was morbidly afraid her face might somehow have become a sort of awful crystal in which everybody would be able to see the Rigi, and herself being proposed to on its top.

"Shocking white about the gills," said the hearty man standing over her, cup in hand and see-sawing on his toes and heels because his boots creaked and it gave him a vague pleasure to make them go on doing it. "You must come round and have a good game of tennis with Dorothy some afternoon. You've been shut up working too hard at that letter-writing business, that's what you've been doing, young lady."

"I wish I had—oh, I wish I had," said Ingeborg, pressing her hands together and looking up at this stray bit of kindliness with a quick gratefulness.

"We always think of you as sitting there writing, writing," the hearty man went on, more intent on what he was saying than on what she was saying. "Father's right hand, mother's indispensable, you know. I tell Dorothy—"

Ingeborg twisted on her chair. "Oh," she said, "don't tell Dorothy—don't tell her—"

"Tell her what? You don't know what I was going to say."

"Yes, I do—about that's how daughters ought to be—like me. And Dorothy's so good and dear, and wouldn't ever in this world have gone off to—"

She stopped, but only just in time, and looked at him frightened.

She had all but said it. The general, however, was staring at her with kindly incomprehension. Her head drooped a little, and she gazed vaguely at his toes as they rhythmically touched and were lifted up from the carpet. "Nobody knows what anybody else is really like inside," she finished forlornly.

"You come up and have some tennis," he said, patting her on the shoulder. And later on to the Bishop he remarked, in his hearty desire to have everything trim and in its proper place, the young in the fresh air, older persons at desks in studies, white faces reserved for invalids, roses blooming in the cheeks of girls, that he mustn't overwork that little daughter of his.

"Overwork!" exclaimed the Bishop, full of bitter memories of an empty week.

"Turn her out into the sun, Bully, my boy," said the general whose fag the Bishop had been at Eton.

"Into the sun!" exclaimed the Bishop, having for six mortal days observed her from windows horribly idling in it.

"If you keep 'em shut up you can't expect girls any more than you can expect a decent bee to provide you with honey."

"Honey!" exclaimed the Bishop.

That Duchess who had wanted her eldest son to marry Judith tapped Ingeborg on the arm with her umbrella as she passed her followed by her daughter and said: "Little pale child, little pale child," and shook her head at her and frowned and smiled, and whispered to Pamela that it looked very like jealousy; and Pamela said Nonsense to that, and tried to linger and talk to Ingeborg, but her mother, filled with the passion for refreshment that seizes all persons who go to parties, dragged her along with her to where it could be found, and on the way she was seen by the Bishop, who at once left the old lady who was talking to him to enfold Lady Pamela in his care and compass her about with a cloud of little attentions—chairs, ices, fruit; for not only had he confirmed her but he felt a peculiar interest in her particular kind of clean-limbed intelligent beauty. Of all the confirmation crosses he had given away he liked best to think of Lady Pamela's. Certainly in that soft cradle, beneath the muslin and lace of propriety, he could be sure it would not jangle against an illicit and alien ring.

"You still wear it?" he said, his beautiful voice, lowered to suit the subject, charged with feeling as with his own hands he brought her tea; and he felt a little checked, a little disappointed, when she said, smiling at him, her grey eyes level with his so well grown was she, "Wear what?"

And another thing this young woman did that afternoon that checked and disappointed him—she showed a disposition to take care of him; and no bishop of sixty, or indeed any other honest man of sixty, likes that. "She thinks me old," he thought with acute and pained surprise as she charmingly made him sit down lest he might be tired standing, and charmingly shut a window behind them lest he should be in a draught, and charmingly later on when he took her down the garden to show her the pear-tree turned her pretty head and asked him over her shoulder whether she were walking too fast. "She thinks me old," he thought; and it was an amazement to him, for only last year he was still fifty-nine, still in the fifties, and the fifties, once one was used to them, were nothing at all.

He became very grave with Lady Pamela. He felt that the showing of the pear-tree had lost a good deal of its savour. He felt it still more when, turning the bend in the path that led to the secluded corner that made the pear-tree popular as a resort, he perceived Ingeborg sitting beneath it.

She was alone.

"Why is she always by herself?" asked Lady Pamela, who was, the Bishop could not help thinking, being rather steadily tactless.

He made no answer. He was too seriously nettled. Apart from everything else, to have one's daughter cropping up....

"Ingeborg—!" called Lady Pamela, waving her sunshade to attract her attention as they walked on towards her, for Ingeborg, under the tree, was sitting with her chin on her hand looking at nothing and once more advertising by her attitude, Mrs. Bullivant would have considered, that she was outside the pale.

"I think," said the Bishop pausing, "we ought perhaps to go back."

"Ought we? Oh, why? It's lovely here. Ingeborg!"

"I think," said the Bishop, now altogether annoyed at this persistent determination to include his daughter—as though one could ever satisfactorily include daughters—in what might have been a poetic conversation between beauty and youth on the one side and prestige and more than common gifts on the other, beauty, too, if you come to that, and as great in its male ripe way as hers in its girlishness—"I think that I at any rate must go back. My wife—"

"Ingeborg! Wake up! What are you dreaming about?"

Positively Lady Pamela was not listening to him.

He turned on his heel and left her to go on waving her sunshade at his daughter if that was what she liked, and went back towards the house reflecting that women really are quite sadly deficient in imagination and that it is a great pity. Even this one, this well-bred, well-taught bright being, was so unimaginative that she actually saw no reason why a man's grown-up daughter.... Really a deficiency of imagination amounted to stupidity. He hardly liked to have to admit that Lady Pamela was stupid, but anyhow women ought not to have the vote.

He went away back into the main garden along the path by the great herbaceous border then in a special splendour of tulips and all the clean magnificence of May, thinking with his eyes on the ground how different things would have been if when he was a curate he had been sane enough not to marry. The clearness now in his life if only he had not done that! Nobody sofa-ridden in it, no grown-up thwarting daughters, and himself vigorous, distinguished, entirely desirable as a husband, choosing with the mellow, yet not too mellow, wisdom of middle life exactly who was best fitted to share the advantages he had to offer. Even Lady Pamela would not then have been able to think of him as old. It was his family that dated him: his grey-haired wife, his grown-up daughters. The folly of curates! The black incurable folly of curates. And he forgot for a gloomy instant what he as a rule with a sigh acknowledged, that it had all been Providence, even then restlessly at work guiding him, and that Mrs. Bullivant and the girls merely constituted one of its many inscrutable ends.

The baser portion of the Bishop's brain was about to substitute another word for guiding when he was saved—providentially, the nobler portion of his brain instantly pointed out—by encountering the Duchess.

She was coming slowly along examining the plants in the border with the interest of a garden-lover, and pointing out by means of her umbrella the various successes to a man the Bishop took to be one of her party. He was a big man in ill-fitting shiny black with something of the air of one of the less reputable Cabinet Ministers and was, in fact, Herr Dremmel; but no one except Herr Dremmel knew it. He had arrived that afternoon, a man animated by a single purpose, which was to marry Ingeborg as soon as possible and get back quickly to his work; and he had come straight from the station to the Palace and walked in unquestioned with all the others, and after a period of peering about in the drawing-room for Ingeborg had drifted out into the garden, where he had at once stumbled upon the Duchess, who was being embittered by a prebendary of servile habits who insisted on agreeing with her as to the Latin name of a patch of Prophet-flower when she knew all the time she was wrong.

"You tell me," she said, turning on Herr Dremmel who was peering at them.

"What shall I tell you, madam?" he inquired, politely sweeping off his felt hat and bowing beautifully.

"This. What is its name? I've forgotten."

Herr Dremmel, who took a large interest in botany, immediately told her.

"Of course," said the Duchess. "I knew it was Arnebia even when I said it was something else. It's a borage."

"Arnebia echinoides, madam," said Herr Dremmel peering closer. "A native of Armenia."

"Of course they'll conquer us," remarked the Duchess to the prebendary.

"Oh, of course," he agreed, though he did not take her meaning, for he had been a prebendary some time and was a little slow, intellectually, at getting under way.

Then the Duchess dropped him and turned entirely to Herr Dremmel, who though he had never seen a herbaceous border in his life by sheer reasoning was able to tell her very intimately what the Bishop, who he supposed did the digging, had been doing to it the previous autumn, and the exact amount and nature of the fertilizers he had put in.

She was suggesting he should come back with her that afternoon to Coops and stay there indefinitely, so profound and attractive did his knowledge seem of what her own garden and her farm needed in the way of a treatment he alluded to as cross-dressing, when he interrupted her—a thing that had never happened to her before while inviting somebody to Coops—to inquire why there were so very many people in the drawing-room and on the lawn.

The Duchess stared. "It's a party," she said. "To celebrate the betrothal. Don't you know?"

"I am gratified," said Herr Dremmel, "to find the parents so evidently pleased. It adds a grace to what was already full of charm. But would it not have been more complete if they had invited me?"

"I quite agree with you," said the Duchess. "Much more complete. Well, anyhow, here you are. So you think my soil wants nitrogen?"

"Certainly, madam. In the form of rape cape and ammonia salts—but combined with organic manure. Artificial manure alone will not, in hot weather—who is that?" he broke off, pointing with his umbrella to the Bishop advancing along the path, his eyes on the ground, sardonically meditating.

"What?" said the Duchess, intent on the notes she was making of his recommendations in her note-book.

"That," said Herr Dremmel.

The Duchess looked up. "Why, the Bishop, of course. Go on about the hot weather."

"Her father," said Herr Dremmel; and he advanced, hat in hand, and the other held out in friendliest greeting, to meet him.

The Duchess went after him. "Bishop," she said, "this is a man who knows all the things worth knowing." And the Bishop, taking this to be her introduction of a friend, cordially returned Herr Dremmel's handshake.

He was never cordial again.

"Sir," said Herr Dremmel, "I am greatly pleased to make your acquaintance. My name is Dremmel. Robert Dremmel."

The Bishop had just enough self-control not to snatch his hand away, but to let Herr Dremmel continue to hold and press it. His mind began to leap about. How to get the Duchess away; how to get Herr Dremmel turned, noiselessly, out of the house; how to prevent Ingeborg's coming at any moment along the path behind them with Lady Pamela....

"We have every reason, sir," said Herr Dremmel, holding the Bishop's hand in a firm pressure, "to congratulate each other, I you, on the possession of such a daughter, you me—"

"Isn't she a lovely girl," said the Duchess, for whom only Judith existed in that family. "Would rape cake and the other thing help my flowers at all, or is it only for the mangels?"

"Mangels!" thought the Bishop, "Rape cake!" And swiftly glanced behind him down the path.

"Sir," said Herr Dremmel, desiring to be very pleasant to the Bishop and slightly waving the Duchess aside, "permit me also to congratulate you—"

"Have you had any tea?" inquired the Bishop desperately of the Duchess, turning to her and getting his hand away.

"Thank you, yes. Well, Mr. Dremmel? Don't interrupt him, Bishop, he's most interesting."

"—on the results," continued Herr Dremmel to the Bishop, "of your autumnal activities. This blaze of flowers is sufficient witness to the devotion, the assiduity—"

"You don't suppose he did it himself, do you?" said the Duchess.

"And your costume, sir," said Herr Dremmel, concentrated on the Bishop and earnestly desiring to please, "suggests a quite particular and familiar interest in what this lady rightly calls the things really worth knowing."

"But he can't help wearing that," said the Duchess.

Again Herr Dremmel, and with some impatience, waved her aside.

"It is a costume most appropriate in a garden," he continued. "Even the gaiters are horticultural, and the apron is pleasantly reminiscent of the innocence of our first parents. So Adam might have dressed—"

"Oh, but you must come to Coops!" cried the Duchess. "Bishop, he's to come back with me."

"Sir," said Herr Dremmel with something of severity, for he was beginning to consider the Duchess forward, "is this lady Mrs. Bishop?"

"Oh, oh!" screamed the Duchess, while Herr Dremmel watched her disapprovingly and the Bishop struggled not to seize him by the throat.

"My dear Bishop," said the Duchess, wiping her eyes, "I never had such a compliment paid me. The best-looking bishop on the bench-"

"Do come indoors," he implored. "I can't really let you stand about like this—"

"Thank you, I'm not in the least tired. Go on, Mr. Dremmel."

"Sir, can I see you alone?" said Herr Dremmel, now without any doubt as to the Duchess's forwardness. "On such an occasion as this, before we begin together openly to rejoice it seems fitting we should first by ourselves, unless this lady is your daughter's mother—"

"Oh, oh!" again screamed the Duchess.

The Bishop turned on him in a kind of blaze, quite uncontrollable. "Yes, sir, you can," he said. "Come into my study—"

"What? Are you going to take him away from me?" cried the Duchess.

"My dear Duchess, if he has business with me—" said the Bishop. "I'll take you indoors first," he said, offering her his arm. "This gentleman"—he glared at him sideways, and Herr Dremmel, all unused as he was to noticing hostility, yet was a little surprised at the expression of his face—"will wait here. No, no, he won't, he'll come, too"—for approaching round the bushes behind which grew the pear-tree the Bishop had caught sight of skirts. "Come on, sir—"

"But—" said the Duchess, as the Bishop drew her hand hastily through his arm and began to walk her off more quickly than she had been walked off for years.

"Come on, sir—" the Bishop flung back, almost hissed back, at Herr Dremmel.

"One moment," said Herr Dremmel holding up his hand, his gaze fixed on what was emerging from the bushes.

"Come on, sir!" cried the Bishop, "I can only see you alone if you come at once—"

But Herr Dremmel did not heed him. He was watching the bushes.

"Will you come?" said the Bishop, pausing and stamping his foot, while he held the Duchess tight in the grip of his arm.

"Why," said Herr Dremmel without heeding him, "why—yes—why it is—why, here at last appears the Little Sugar Lamb!"

"The little what?" said the Duchess, resolutely pulling out her hand from the Bishop's arm and putting up her eyeglass. "Heavens above us, he can't mean Pamela?"

But nobody answered her; and indeed it was not necessary, for Herr Dremmel, gone down the path with a swiftness amazing in one of his appearance, was already, in the sight of all Redchester and most of the county, enfolding Ingeborg in his arms.

"Of course," was the Duchess's comment to the Bishop as she watched the scene with her eyeglass up and the placidity of relief, "of course they will conquer us."