“It is this that makes me talk. The time is so short, here, and over there--who knows about over there? One speaks out at last, I find, after being good for sixty years. For I have been good, have I not, Henry, for sixty years,--listened and listened, helped, as you believe, your work? It has been a great thing to be jealous of so great a work! Did you really think my mind was in it, that I really cared,--I!--for missions, for making men over, for turning a town right about face! “I never expected to speak out; pictures in frames do not expect to speak out. Yet I might have known, for sooner or later everyone does speak out to you. I’ve been rather proud of being the one exception. But is it not my turn? And yours to listen, to me, just once, at last? You are surprised, I suppose. I am afraid I do not care that you are. I had to open your eyes. You speak as if I existed only to carry on your work--it has always been like that. So I’ve drawn you a portrait. Do you still think, looking at it, that I am the one to give you hope, I! What do you think, Henry Collinton, of the portrait of Lucy Dwight?” Her strangely gleaming eyes at last met the Bishop’s deep gaze, profound, unfaltering. There was stillness, then the Bishop spoke, in quiet judgment on himself, “My work? Yet I had hoped that it seemed God’s. And for sixty years I have thought that you loved it!” “I have loved you!” There was no old age for them now, no past, no future. Beyond the room that briefly held them were night and the river and death. She was Lucy Dwight of the flickering fire flame, who laid bare at the last her deathless desire. The man she loved was God’s, was all men’s. After a lifetime of delicate sanity, she cried out to him to be for one hour hers. Then she waited.