To the Bishop, room and river and woman were still the same. Spent to the uttermost as he knew himself to be to-day, Lucy’s indomitable vitality quickened him with sharp hope; perhaps, after all, there was much he could still leave to Lucy! But not yet for him the outpouring, as ever, into Lucy’s ear. That would come, but not yet! How happy, now, shut in by that race round and round the walls of those merry picnickers, to pluck, as it were a Christmas gift from a tree, one hour in which they should still be boy and girl together. As they talked, two faces looked over their shoulders; over the Bishop’s a boy’s with brown hair flung back, with eager listening eyes, and a mouth that spoke poetry and as instantly laughed out in merry mockery of it, a face that, clear as water, was all the play of a mobile brain; and close by Lucy’s head, another in a white bonnet, green-ribboned and green-leaved, from which, framed in red-gold curls, looked out a tinted cameo face, with green-blue eyes, mocking and mysterious. To-day, Lucy’s body was still fragile and unbroken, as in girlhood, and for all she had married and borne four children, her soul still went unfettered as when she was a girl. But age had charred the Bishop’s face to fine white ashes, in which the blue eyes burned, luminous and inward. “Henry,” mused Lucy, “the poetry never came back to you, did it? Do you ever write nowadays, ever snare a little wild, singing poem now?” “The verses come to me sometimes still, but not near enough to catch, or to _wish_ to catch, perhaps. I do sometimes see the pictures still, this very morning, for instance, and I hear rhythms; but, no, I have never written since--since Nan went.” He was silent a moment, lips tightening, then lights began to gleam on his face, with the familiar pleasure of thinking aloud to Lucy. “But perhaps I do not write because I can no longer distinguish between poetry and prose, in life. That is boy’s work, really, to see the sharp outlines of things that afterwards, for us, seem to overlap, to interweave. Poetry and prose, which is which? Just so the distinction between the sacred and the secular, easy enough at twenty, not at eighty: then the two were clear to me as bars of sun and shadow on a pavement; now the sun-bars would seem all softened with shadow, and the shadow all shot through with sun. Just so the distinction between the divine and the human, God and man, where shall one separate the two? Can anyone say. Just so far,--” here the Bishop, all eager explanation, drew the figure of a cross upon the leather armchair, keeping an ivory finger tip upon the spot, “just so far shall God stoop to man, just so far man rise to God! Oh! no, no!” He erased the imaginary cross with a quick brushing of his long hand, “life is not like that, not sharp distinctions, it is all interwoven, interwoven!