Her face, working with sobs she forced down, was too painful to look at, yet it gave no hope. “I am very sorry,” he said quietly and turning went into the great study adjoining, which faced, like the dining-room, on the veranda and river. Suddenly very tired, he sank into his desk chair, pressing the tips of his fingers to his temples, which had such a painful way of throbbing every little while this morning. “I did want it very much,” he acknowledged to himself, “very much.” He sat thinking, for some moments, then remembering, rose and went into the hall to put on his overcoat, whispering, “But it happened to Him like this always--always!” About to go out into the street, he turned back. The dining-room door was shut. He opened it. Mrs. Graham was still standing in the window recess, her forehead pressed to the cooling pane. There was no one to see her face. Common-place, coarse, ugly with tears, lights were trembling across it. “If she needs me,” she was whispering, “if she needs me,--” for a holy thing was being born. In the doorway, wearing his old cape overcoat, his face like a wistful child’s beneath his silver hair, the Bishop waited. “You will go?” She did not hear, nor know. She did not move until she started at a sound, the heavy closing of the outer door. PART II The river was a splendor of Christmas sunshine. A flurry of snow had lightly powdered the brown sod beneath the double rows of elms. Few people were abroad. Sometimes a little group of children, eyes and feet a-dance, and cheeks nipped red, went tripping past the Bishop. Older folk passed with hearty, careless greeting, for the stooping figure in the cape overcoat was as familiar and unnoted as the river itself with all its mystery of light. The Bishop had known Westbury so long and so well that he felt that the homes by which he was passing, all bright with holly, were his homes, that he might have stopped anywhere to share the Christmasing. His slowly pacing feet, however, were bent on the old way toward St. John’s Rectory. In the old days the Bishop had always called at the Rectory to greet Barty Judd and his household before church-time, and he still kept to the habit, even though it was so different now at the Rectory.