LITMIR.BIZ

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implored heaven's guidance—but he would allow a certain amount of resurrection, sufficient to enable her to sit up at her desk every day and disentangle the confusion her wickedness alone had caused. In the evenings she would, he thought, at any rate for a time, be best put back in her grave.

      At this point he began to be able to say "Poor girl," and to feel that he pitied her.

      But it was not till the end of the week, as Sunday drew near, that his prayers did after all begin to be answered, and he regained enough control of his words if not of his thoughts to be able to reappear among his family and show nothing less becoming than reserve. He even succeeded, though without speaking to her, in kissing Ingeborg's forehead night and morning and making the sign of the Cross over her when she went to bed as he had done from her earliest years. She seemed smaller than ever, hardly there at all, and made him think of an empty dress walking about with a head on it. Contemplating her when she was not looking his desire to shake her became finally quenched by the perception that really there would be nothing to shake. It would be like shaking out mere clothes, garments with the body gone out of them; there would be dust, but little satisfaction. She had evidently been feeling, he was slightly soothed to observe, for not only was her dress empty but her face seemed diminished, and she certainly was remarkably pale. She struck him as very unattractive, entirely designed by Providence for a happy home life. And to think that this nothing, this amazing littleness—well, well; poor girl.

      On the Sunday afternoon he determined to help her by getting into touch with her from the pulpit. On that day he several times assured himself before preaching that his only feeling in the sad affair was one of concern for her and grief. The pulpit, he knew from experience, was a calm and comfort-bringing place when he was in it; it was, indeed, his way with a pulpit that had brought the Bishop to the pinnacle of the Church on which he found himself. He was at his best in it, knowing it for a blessed spot, free from controversy, pure from contradiction, a place where personal emotions could find no footing owing to the wise custom that prevented congregations from answering back. Put into common terms, the terms of his undergraduate days, he could let himself rip in the pulpit; and the Bishop was in a ripped condition altogether at his greatest.

      He spoke that Sunday specially to Ingeborg, and he told himself that what had come straight from his heart must needs go straight to hers. The Bible was very plain. It did not mince matters as to the dangers she was running. The punishment for her class of sin right through it was various and severe. Not that the ravens of another age and the eagles of a different climate—he had taken as his text that passage, or rather portion of a passage—he described it as remarkable—in the Proverbs: "The ravens of the valley shall pick it out and the young eagles shall eat it"—were likely ever miraculously to appear in Redchester, though even on that point the Bishop held that nothing was certain; but there were, he explained, spiritual ravens and eagles provided by an all-merciful Providence for latter-day requirements whose work was even more thorough and destructive. He earnestly implored those members of his flock who knew themselves guilty of the particular sin the passage referred to, to seek forgiveness of their parents before Heaven interfered. He pointed out that what is most needed, if people are to live with any zest and fine result at all, is encouragement, and what encouragement could equal full and free forgiveness? The Bible, he said, understood this very well, and the Prodigal Son's father never hesitated in his encouragement. It seemed difficult to suppose one could equal the lavishness of the best robe, the ring, the shoes, and the fatted calf, yet he felt certain—he knew there were fathers at that very moment, there in that town, nay, in that cathedral, ready with all and more than that. Who would wish to punish his dear child, the soul given into his hands to be whitened for heaven? One knew from one's own experience—all who had once been children must know—how sorry one was for having done wrong, how bleeding one felt about it; and just then, just at that moment of sorrow, of heart's blood, was not what one needed so that one might get on one's feet again quickly and do better than ever, not punishment but forgiveness? A frequent and free forgiveness, said the Bishop, and his voice was beautiful as he said it, was one of the chief necessities of life. What poor children want, poor frail children, so infinitely apt to fall, so infinitely clumsy at getting up, is a continual wiping out and never thinking again of the yesterdays, a daily presentation by authority to yesterday's stumblers of that most bracing object, the cleaned and empty slate. Why, it was as necessary, he declared, his fine face aglow, if one was to work well and add one's cheerful contribution to the world's happiness, as a nourishing and sufficient breakfast—the congregation thrilled at this homely touch—and to numb a human being's powers of cheerful contribution by punishment was waste. How cruel, then, to force a father by one's stubbornness to punish; how cruel and how sinful to hinder him, by not seeking out at once what he so freely offered, to hinder him from bringing forth his best robe, his ring, his fatted calf. What a heavy responsibility towards their fathers did children bear, said the Bishop, who had ceased himself being anybody's child many years before. This, he said, is a sermon to children; to erring children; to those sad children who have gone astray. We are all children here, he explained, and if life has been with us so long that we can no longer find any one we may still with any certainty call father, we are yet to the end Children of the Kingdom. But, he continued, though every single soul in this cathedral is necessarily some one's child, not every single soul in it is inevitably some one's father, and he would say a few words to the fathers and remind them of the infinite effect of love. To punish your child is to make its repentance go sour within it. Do not punish it. Love it. Love it continuously, generously, if needs be obstinately; smite its hardness, as once a rock was smitten, with the rod of generosity. Give it a chance of gushing forth into living repentance. Generosity begets generosity. Love begets love. Show your love. Show your generosity. Forgive freely, magnificently. Oh, my brothers, oh, my children, my little sorry children, what could not one, what would not one do in return for love?

      The Bishop's face was lifted up as he finished to the light of the west window. His voice was charged with feeling. He had forgotten the ravens and eagles of the beginning, for he never allowed his beginnings to disturb his endings, well knowing his congregation forgot them, too. He was an artist at reaching into the hearts of the uneducated. Everything helped him—his beauty, his voice, and the manifest way in which his own words moved him.

      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

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