Promptly Serena had emerged from her self-imposed exile; and it was with an air of assured proprietorship that she greeted the clergyman. "Mrs. Nevington heard from your kind sister only this morning," he continued. "Full of active helpfulness as usual, Mrs. Lovegrove.--She proposes that we should quarter ourselves upon you and her for a few days, Miss Serena, while we are seeking a temporary residence. She kindly gives us the names of several houses which she considers worth inspection." Here by an adroit flank movement, rapidly executed, Serena managed to possess herself once again of the seat of honour upon the sofa, thereby interposing a thin but impenetrable barrier between her hostess and the latter's own particular fetish, the bishop-designate. "You have enough room? I do not crowd you, Rhoda?" she remarked parenthetically. Then turning sideways, so as to present an expanse of neatly clad back and shoulder to her outraged relative, she continued:--"I wonder which, Dr. Nevington--I mean I wonder which houses Susan has recommended. Of course there is the Priory. But nobody has lived in it for ages and ages. It is in a very low neighbourhood, close to the canal and brickfields on the Tullingworth Road. I should think it was dreadfully damp and unwholesome. And there is old Mrs. Waghorn's in Abney Park. That is well situated and the grounds are rather nice. But the reception-rooms are poor, I always think. Susan was fond of Mrs. Waghorn. I cannot say I ever cared for her myself; but there is a tower to it, of course." "Ah! we hardly need towers yet, Miss Lovegrove. A 'suffering bishop'--you recall the well-worn joke?--such as myself, must not aspire to anything approaching castles or palaces, but be content with a very modest place of residence." Here his unhappy hostess, sitting quite perilously near the edge of the sofa, craned round the interposing barrier. "But that is only a matter of time, Dr. Nevington," she said, "surely. There is but one voice all round the Green, and through the parish generally, that this is but the first step for you; and that it will lead on--though I am far from wishing to hasten the death of the present archbishop--to the primacy." "Hardly that, hardly that," he rejoined with becoming modesty. Yet the speech was not unpalatable to him. "Out of the mouth of babes," he said to himself, leaning back in his chair, and eyeing--in imagination--the chaste outline of an episcopal apron and well-cut black gaiter, while visions of Lambeth and Canterbury floated enticingly before him.--"Hardly that. This is little more than an embryo bishopric. Still, though it is a wrench to leave my dear old congregation, here in this wonderful London of ours, I cannot refuse the call to a wider sphere of usefulness. My views as a churchman are well known. I have never, even though it might have been professionally advantageous to me to do so, attempted any concealment."