But it would appear that his curiosity concerning the procession was short-lived, for when he reached the scene, he plunged contemptuously between the straggling columns, and gained the further curb. Then he turned down a side street, without one backward look, and took his way forlornly toward St. George's Hall. The bishop, not sorry to be left to his meditations, had made no effort to detain his visitor. Now he extended his hand for another cigar, changed his mind, and sat thinking. Genuinely indifferent to the procession passing by with torches and transparencies and bands of music, he remained with his back toward the windows, his head sunk upon his breast. He was steept in a depressing consciousness of having mismanaged the situation with his daughter, of having widened the breach he had meant to close. His tact had failed him because his affections and interests were too intimately concerned, much as a surgeon's hand might falter in an operation upon one of his own family. What was the meaning of this strange interest which Felicity had taken in the career of a man normally beyond the radius of her acquaintance and sympathy? At first it had seemed a jest, then a sentimental charity maintained in foolish pride, but only recently had it created anything approaching estrangement between them. And this situation was the more difficult to bear because of their long intellectual and artistic companionship. She was more to him than a son, for he had a priestly appreciation of the subtlety of women. He had watched her mind unfold in foreign travel, little dreaming that this experience with him was sowing the seeds of discontent with her narrow environment which were now beginning to bear such bitter fruit. Something of a celibate by nature, he loved to think of her as an eternal priestess, who would consecrate herself and her fortune to the work of the Church.