Returning to his somewhat oppressively lonely quarters, Ancram felt the need of further conversation. The Bishop had stirred him to vigorous dissent, which his Lordship’s advantage of situation made peculiarly irritating to so skilled an observer of weak points. He bethought himself that he might write to Philip Doyle. He remembered that Doyle had not answered the letter in which he had written of his changed domestic future, frankly asking for congratulation rather than for condolence; but without resentment, for why should a man trouble himself under Florentine skies with unnecessary Calcutta correspondents? He consulted only his own pleasure in writing again: Doyle was so readily appreciative, he would see the humour in the development of affairs with His Honour. It was almost a week since Mr. Ancram had observed at the ball, with acute annoyance, what an unreasonable effect the matter was having upon Judith Church, and he was again himself able to see the humour of it. He finally wrote with much facility a graphically descriptive letter, in which the Bishop came in as a mere picturesque detail at the end. He seemed to pick his way, as he turned the pages, out of an embarrassing moral quagmire; he was so obviously high and dry when he could fix the whole thing in a caricature of effective paragraphs. He wrote:— /# “I don’t mind telling you privately that I have no respect whatever for the scheme, and very little for the author of it. He reminds one of nothing so #/ /# much as an elderly hen sitting, with the obstinacy of her kind, on eggs out of which it is easy to see no addled reform will ever step to crow. He is as blind as a bat to his own deficiencies. I doubt whether even his downfall will convince him that his proper sphere of usefulness in life was that of a Radical cobbler. He has a noble preference for the ideal of an impeccable Indian administrator, which he goes about contemplating, while his beard grows with the tale of his blunders. The end, however, cannot be far off. Bengal is howling for his retirement; and, notwithstanding a fulsome habit he has recently developed of hanging upon my neck for sympathy, I own to you that, if circumstances permitted, I would howl too.” #/