she might not realise the importance of absolute rest, and"—as a brilliant thought occurred to him—"and you'll give me a prescription."

"Certainly," said Sir Joseph. "I'll do both now."

"Thanks," murmured the Bishop, and, receiving[Pg 95] the precious documents, he took his leave.

[Pg 95]

The great physician's letter he put carefully in an inside pocket; the prescription he never remembered to get filled.

"A month," he said to himself; "that ought to be time enough." And he hailed a cab, and driving promptly to the nearest American steamship office, he engaged a passage forthwith.

"I wonder what Sir Joseph thought about it," he meditated, as he paid for his ticket. In this respect, however, he did his adviser an injustice. Sir Joseph never thought about it at all. It was not part of his profession.

Most people would have united in saying that the Bishop of Blanford was an exceedingly fortunate man. No one was possessed of an estate boasting fairer lawns or more noble beeches, and the palace was a singularly successful combination of ecclesiastical antiquity and nineteenth-century comfort. The cathedral was a gem, and its boy choir the[Pg 96] despair of three neighbouring sees, while, owing to a certain amount of worldly wisdom on the part of former investors of the revenues, the bishopric was among the most handsomely endowed in England. Yet his Lordship was not happy. All his life long there had been a blot upon his enjoyment, and that blot was his sister, Miss Matilda Banborough.

[Pg 96]

Miss Matilda was blatantly good, an intolerant virtue that accounted for multitudes of sins in other people. Her one ambition was to bring up the Bishop in the way she thought he should go, and hitherto she had been wonderfully successful. All through his married life she had resided at the palace and been the ruling power, and when his wife had died twenty years before, snuffed out by the cold austerity of the Bishop's sister and the ecclesiastical monotony of Blanford, Miss Matilda had assumed the reins of power, and had never laid them down.

The Bishop's wife had been a weak, amiable woman, and her last conscious request was to be buried in the sunlight, but her sister-in-law[Pg 97] remarked that "her mind must have been wandering, for 

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