The singular clarity of the Bishop’s brain had annulled for him every other emotion. He no longer felt any shock of revelation. The lucidity of his thinking was like a physical sensation of actual daylight in the room and beyond the windows. He saw the past as if it had been written in a foreign tongue and with a new meaning, but he saw it as plainly as black print on white paper. The woman before him was one whom he had never known, but he read her soul, too, clear as a printed page. So strangely clear his head, it seemed to him he could have laid his hand on that wall of death Lucy had talked of, that it would have crumbled at his touch, leaving him standing on the other side, in this same new daylight, serene and unsurprised. So crystal his thoughts that words seemed to him a remote and frivolous medium, like a grown man’s being forced to rediscover his baby-lisp in order to make himself understood. His personal pain had become merely a matter for reflection and limpid analysis. Carried far on thought that ran deep and wide, the Bishop spoke, hardly conscious of his words, “But love _loves_! It does not hurt! You knew me and my faith in you and my hope through you. If you had loved me, would you have destroyed for me that faith and hope? Would you not have taken from my hand my boy and my town, to take care of and to help, if you had loved me?” They seemed to sit there as if looking on these words, in a silence that grew palpitant. Then her cry broke, “Henry, I can be all that you have believed, I can promise to try to do all that you desire. If you ask me to do it for you! Do you?” All in that strange daylight within his brain, the Bishop saw the future, saw his work die with him. In the same white light he saw the woman before him whom he had never known. Lucy waited. God’s or hers? Yet why had she loved him except because he had never been hers? The Bishop’s gaze rested upon her in a far tranquillity of insight. “No.” He sat there, quiet as a portrait before her gaze, and all alone. She had desired to rouse him from bodily weakness, and there was about him now no taint of feebleness. He sat erect, his long hands tranquil but not flaccid. A smile touched his lips, so fine and firm, a man’s smile, not a child’s; a smile of thought in retrospect, neither bright nor bitter. He had believed his lonely life cheered by a beautiful friendship, so sacred that he had supposed it hallowed the shrines of his God, of his wife, even as he did. This friendship had not been what he thought it. Truth was well. He had no friend. There remained God. “Henry!” He looked over to her with a far, alien pity. “Have I lost you, Henry? I was never mad before. To keep you I have been for a lifetime so frightfully wise! Have I lost you now?”