She could not bring herself to say the word. “This is Bishop Chalmers, daughter,” was Blaisdell’s reply. “Bishop Chalmers!” gasped the girl, with wide-open eyes. “Why, bishop, I heard you preach on ‘Charity’ last night.” “On ‘Charity,’ which I so badly lacked--that which I thought I possessed, but which I had so little of for my own son,” said the bishop. “The boy whom you knew simply as Nowell was my son, Miss Blaisdell--Lionel Nowell Chalmers. His father”--he cleared his throat--“was so uncharitable as to deny him the privilege of calling him father.” “To think that he was the son of a bishop, and now it’s too late! Oh, why would not he tell us!” she cried, reproachfully. She had burst into a fresh fit of sobbing. Blaisdell, one arm thrown affectionately around the waist of the weeping girl, placed the other on the bishop’s shoulder. “Your son and my daughter were in love with one another,” he said, simply. “I have no son, and the boy was much at my house. I trusted him fully in everything. I saw the growing attachment between the two. I was certain that he came of good people, but, as a father, and on account of my social position, I had to be sure. I asked him, as he loved Bettina and she him, to tell me who his father was. “He would not,” continued Blaisdell, after a pause. “I felt sure he had some excellent motive for keeping his secret. I did not press him further, and there the matter rested.” A pent-up sob came from the soul of the bishop. “So much it would have meant to him,” he said, and added, softly, as if to himself: “As the father, in his priestly vestments, would not recognize the son in his Satan’s trappings, so the son could not acknowledge the father. Oh, Lord, spare him to us yet a while.” The door opened and a nurse appeared on the threshold. She looked curiously at the group. “Jockey Nowell is conscious and asking for his father, the bishop,” she stated, with unintentional emphasis on the last word, and then added, in a coldly professional tone: “He will recover, the physicians say, but his injuries will probably prevent him from riding again--at least not for a very long while.” Blaisdell drew a sharp breath. His face was troubled. “That means my retirement from the turf,” he said, with a sigh. “I have lost the one jockey I could trust.” “And I have gained--a son,” breathed the bishop, starting forward. Pausing, he took the sobbing girl by the hand. “You will see him later, daughter,” he whispered. His face radiant with a smile it had not known for years, the little bishop followed the nurse down the passage. A door opened and closed noiselessly behind them. [Illustration] The PRINCESS’ KINGDOM By William J. Locke [Illustration]