d his
curates--they're all Fathers there, and celibates by choice--are wolves in
wool, and Mephistophelean plotters against the liberties of the Church.
_Punch_ published a cartoon of the Bishop shutting his eyes and charging
at a windmill in a cope and chasuble. He is sending out a string of
Protestant-Church-Integrity vans all over England, Scotland, and Wales
this season, with acetylene-lantern pictures from Foxe's 'Book of
Martyrs,' and a lecturer to point the morals and adorn the tales.... But
if he could see his Mary's boy to-day, he'd put up with any amount of
felt-basin hats and Roman collars, and incense and altar-genuflections
wouldn't count for a tikkie. Oh! it's been a sore with me this many a
year, but when I saw him to-day I said, 'Thank God I never had a child!'
Because to have seen a boy or girl grow up and wither away as that
beautiful young fellow is withering, is a thing that a mother must shudder
to look back upon, even when she has found her lost one again in Heaven."

There was genuine feeling in her voice, usually loud, harsh, and tuneless.
The bright black bird-eyes had a gleam as of tears. He turned to her with
sympathetic interest.

"The Bishop will be obliged to you for finding this out. No hint of it had
reached me. I am due at the Hospital in the morning, and we'll see if
something can't be done for the boy."

She shook her head.

"It's a case of tuberculous lung-disease. He developed it in the Clergy
House at St. Margaret's, and made light of it, supposing or pretending
that the cough and wasting and difficulty of breathing meant bronchial
trouble, the result of London fogs. These young people who don't value
Life--glorious gift that it is! When he broke down utterly, at the end of
a rampant campaign against Intemperance--he wouldn't be the Bishop's son
if he didn't gall the withers of some hobby-horse or other--the doctors
agreed there was nothing for him but South Africa."

He frowned, knowing how many sufferers had died of that deadly
prescription. She went on:

"So he came out--alone--upon the advice of the well-intentioned wiseacres,
knowing nothing of the country, to live on his two hundred a year until
the end. And the end is coming--in Gueldersdorp Hospital--with giant
strides." She blinked. "They've isolated him in a small detached ward. He
has a kind friend in the Matron, and the chart-nurse is in love with him,
unless I'm mistaken in the symptoms of the complaint. And he lo