The Bishop did not actually doze off, however, but sat resting quietly in the peaceful borderland of sleep. The threadbare house that harbored him was very silent. From time to time, across his dim worn face, fancies flickered, bright as a caged bird’s dreaming. Out of the engulfing vagueness of his brain, Annie came to him, the child-woman of long ago. His boat was rocking at the little pier waiting, as she came tripping down the terraces. He saw the upward sweep of the round young arms as she opened the high wrought-iron gate. She wore a white muslin sprigged with yellow, wide-skirted and flounced. The live brown of her hair was swept back into a net. Her face was soft olive and rose, her lips parted, and the eyes grave and steady, a child’s. On either side about the high black portals of the gate pulsed and flamed wee yellow roses. Slim, sturdy boy that he was, something had shaken him in that moment like a tossed leaf. Even now, old and dim in his chair, it was not the sense of her lips beneath his sudden ones that he remembered; it was that there in that instant he saw her eyes change forever to a woman’s. And the boy, all a-quiver with strong youth as he was, he, too, in that moment had changed into a man, a man forever reverent before the mystery he had wakened. The Bishop’s hand tightened on the chair arm, for he remembered that at last, at last, Annie was coming back to him. He was waiting for her to come in. Again thought shifted many a year; and he sat expectant of a knock, light, imperative, merry, Nan’s evening knock. The door swung in and she entered, that tall, slim girl of his. She wore a white dress girt about in the absurd panniers of the eighties. Her dark hair was looped low at her neck. She had her mother’s brooding brown eyes lightened by her father’s twinkle. She sank on a hassock at his knee, folding her long figure up in a trick of grace she had. “Ready to hear a secret, father?” As on so many, many evenings, he was ready to hear a secret, the secrets a motherless girl may tell to her father. The Bishop remembered still one secret she had told him which had seemed to be a fine silk thread cutting his heart in two, for the father, listening, knew that the man Nan loved was not worthy of her. Then a tiny smile touched the worn old lips, a smile of pride, half-jealous, at the memory that it was her father, not her husband, that Nan had first told about her little baby. The father’s blood, even now, beat faster at the thought of that remembered hope. Then again he saw the wee waxen form on Nan’s arm. But instantly mysterious glad expectancy swept that sight from him as he recalled that even now he was listening for Nan’s tap-tap at his study door, Nan, once more coming to tell him a secret, a secret blithe, unguessed.