She resumed her chair obediently, and waited for him to ask more questions. Apparently he was unwilling or unable to do so, and the silence seemed interminable, though in reality it lasted but a few minutes. During that short time the bishop's thoughts ranged with characteristic rapidity over every aspect of the situation. Emmet as a son-in-law! First of all, the fact that he was the mayor of Warwick, a fact which the bishop had hitherto belittled, now presented itself as a mitigating circumstance. Then the thought that he was a Catholic followed immediately, to suggest complications and humiliations which the bishop's large experience enabled him to see with fatal distinctness. What was the man's paltry office compared with this stupendous fact? Nothing--a mere accident--a passing honour that would probably be plucked from him two years hence, leaving him--what? Tom Emmet, ex-professional baseball player and streetcar conductor, out of a job, no longer mayor, but always a Catholic, married to the richest woman in Warwick, and that woman his daughter, the daughter of Bishop Wycliffe! It was inevitable that he should look at the situation from the point of view of the bishop rather than from that of the father simply. Had she been a son who had "gone over to Rome" after taking Anglican orders, the bishop's professional humiliation would not have been as great as that which now stared him in the face. It would have been a keen disappointment indeed, but lightened by the prospect of his son's preferment in an ancient communion. There would still have been the possibility of a career for the boy, a career which his father could watch, or at least anticipate, with emotions of pride; for the bishop was too purely an ecclesiastic to under-estimate professional success in the Church of Rome. The career of a Cardinal Newman, for example, was one that challenged his respect, however much he regretted the loss of such talents to the Anglican faith, however forcibly he might characterise the convert's action as apostasy.