he had heard he was a great painter.

'I don't know--I don't know,' replied Mr. Barton; 'painting is, after
all, only dreaming. I should like to be put at the head of an army, but
when I am seized with an idea I have to rush to put it down.'

Finding no appropriate answer to these somewhat erratic remarks, the
priest joined in a discussion that had been started concerning the
action taken by the Church during the present agrarian agitation. Mr.
Barton, who was weary of the subject, stepped aside, and, sitting on one
of the terrace benches between Cecilia and Alice, he feasted his eyes on
the colour-changes that came over the sea, and in long-drawn-out and
disconnected phrases explained his views on nature and art until the
bell was rung for the children to assemble in the school-hall.

II

It was a large room with six windows; these had been covered over with
red cloth, and the wall opposite was decorated with plates, flowers, and
wreaths woven out of branches of ilex and holly.

Chairs for the visitors had been arranged in a semicircle around the
Bishop's throne--a great square chair approached by steps, and rendered
still more imposing by the canopy, whose voluminous folds fell on either
side like those of a corpulent woman's dress. Opposite was the stage.
The footlights were turned down, but the blue mountains and brown
palm-trees of the drop-curtain, painted by one of the nuns, loomed
through the red obscurity of the room. Benches had been set along the
walls. Between them a strip of carpet, worked with roses and lilies,
down which the girls advanced when called to receive their prizes,
stretched its blue and slender length.

'His Grace is coming!' a nun cried, running in, and instantly the
babbling of voices ceased, and four girls hastened to the pianos placed
on either side of the stage, two left-hands struck a series of chords in
the bass, the treble notes replied, and, to the gallant measure of a
French polka, a stately prelate entered, smiling benediction as he
advanced, the soft clapping of feminine palms drowning, for a moment,
the slangy strains of the polka.

When the Bishop was seated on his high throne, the back of which
extended some feet above his head, and as soon as the crowd of visitors
had been accommodated with chairs around him, a nun made her way through
the room, seeking anxiously among the girls. She carried in her hand a
basket filled with programmes, all rolled and neatly tied