And the typist, as he walked back to the Palace with the chaplain across the daisies of the Close, was unable to agree with the chaplain that a course at Oxford even now in close reasoning might help the Bishop. The typist thought it would spoil him; and offered to lay the chaplain twenty to one that Redchester that afternoon would be full of erring children upsetting their fathers' Sunday by wanting to be forgiven. It was; and Ingeborg was one of them. CHAPTER X She waylaid him after tea on the stairs. "Father," she said timidly, as he was passing on in silence. "Well, Ingeborg?" said the Bishop, pausing and gravely attentive. "I--want to tell you how sorry I am." "Yes, Ingeborg?" "So sorry, so ashamed that I--I went away like that on that tour. It was very wrong of me. And I went with your money. Oh, it was ugly. I--hope you'll forgive me, father?" "Freely, Ingeborg. It would be sad indeed if I lagged behind our Great Exemplar in the matter of forgiveness." "Then--I may come back to work?" "When you tell me you have broken off your clandestine engagement." "But father--" "There are no buts, Ingeborg." "But you said in your sermon--" The Bishop passed on. In her eagerness Ingeborg put her hand detainingly on his sleeve, a familiarity hitherto unheard of in that ordered and temperate household. "But your sermon--you said in your sermon, father--why, how can free forgiveness have conditions? They didn't do it that way in the Bible"--(this to him who was by the very nature of his high office a specialist in forgiveness; poor girl, poor girl)--"You said yourself about the Prodigal Son--his father forgave _everything_, and perhaps he'd done worse things even than going to Lucerne--" "We are not told, Ingeborg, of any clandestine engagement," said the Bishop, pursuing his way hampered but, as he was glad to remember afterwards, calm. "But you know about it--how can it be clandestine when you know about it?" "Once more, Ingeborg, there are no buts." "But why shouldn't I marry a good man?" She was actually following him up quite a number of the stairs, still with her hand on his arm, and her face, so unattractive in its unwomanly eagerness, quite close to his. "Why should I have to be forgiven for wanting to marry a good man? Everybody marries good men. Mother did, and you never told her she wasn't to. Oh, oh--" she went on, as his dressing-room door was quietly closed upon her, "that isn't free forgiveness at all--it isn't what you _said_--it isn't what you _said_--it's _conditions_."... And her voice from the doormat became quite a cry, regardless of possible listening Wilsons.