A few minutes after Gorry had left the cell, in answer to the loud knocking that had echoed through the empty chambers overhead, Dan could hear that he was returning to it, halting slowly down the steps with many a pause, and mumbling remarks meantime, as if lighting some one who came after him. "Yes, my lord, it's dark, very dark. I'll set the lantern here, my lord, and turn the key." In another moment old Gorry was at Dan's side, saying, in a fearful undertone, "Lord 'a' massy! It's the Bishop hisself. I lied to him mortal, so I did--but no use--I said you were sleeping, but no good at all, at all. He wouldn't take rest without putting a sight on you. Here he is--Come in, my lord." Almost before Dan's mind, distraught by other troubles, had time to grasp what Gorry said, the old jailer had clapped his lantern on the floor of the cell, and had gone from it, and Dan was alone with his father. "Dan, are you awake?" the Bishop asked, in a low, eager tone. His eyes were not yet familiar with the half-light of the dark place, and he could not see his son. But Dan saw his father only too plainly, and one glance at him in that first instant of recovered consciousness went far to banish as an empty sophism the soothing assurance he had lately nursed at his heart that in what he had done he had done well. The Bishop was a changed and shattered man. His very stature seemed to have shrunk, and his Jovian white head was dipped into his breast. His great calm front was gone, and in the feeble light of the lantern on the floor his eyes were altered and his face seemed to be cut deep with lines of fear and even of cunning. His irresolute mouth was half-open, as if it had only just emitted a startled cry. In one of his hands he held a small parcel bound tightly with a broad strap, and the other hand wandered nervously in the air before him. Dan saw everything in an instant. This, then, was the first-fruits of that day's work. He rose from his seat. "Father!" he cried, in a faint, tremulous voice. "My son!" the Bishop answered, and for some swift moments thereafter the past that had been very bitter to both was remembered no more by either. But the sweet oblivion was cruelly brief. "Wait," the Bishop whispered, "are we alone?" And with that the once stately man of God crept on tiptoe like a cat to the door of the cell, and put his head to it and listened. "Art thou there, Paton Gorry?" he asked, feebly simulating his accustomed tone of quiet authority. Old Gorry answered from the other side of the door that he was there, that he was sitting on the steps, that he was not sleeping, but waiting my lord's return. The Bishop crept back to Dan's side, with the same cat-like step as before. "You are safe, my son," he whispered in his low eager tone. "You shall leave this place. It is my prison, and you shall go free." Dan had watched his father's movements with a sickening sense. "Then you do not know that I surrendered?" he said, faintly.