bishop's
appointment is political. I ask you then, as a man of the world,
how--short of a miracle--could you expect a man in my position and
circumstances to have kept a technically unblemished record? Surrounded
with luxuries from my birth, disciplined by no real hardship, having to
make no struggle for my existence; brought up to eat meat and drink
wine; athletic, but without any reason or opportunity for leading a
strenuously athletic life; with brains, but with no compulsion to use
them; passed, for the perfecting of my education, from one privileged
grade to another; from the University to the Army, and from thence to
sport and the race-course; from where on God's earth, in this modern
curriculum for kings, was the idea to have occurred to me that I should
do this thing, in attempting to do which your early hermits went
hullabalooing to the desert?

"I am now nearly twenty-six. My father, for reasons of State, married at
twenty-one: I, for similar reasons, have been kept unmarried, no
sufficiently eligible partner could be found for me. And I solved the
time of waiting by contracting a non-legal conjugal relationship with a
woman for whom I had a very real affection, who was considerably my
senior in years, and who knew quite well that the arrangement could only
be temporary. My Lord Archbishop, I ask you--could you in my
circumstances have shown a better, a more blameless record? I was even
punctilious enough to tell your daughter--an excessive scruple, I
think,--she did not understand."

"She understands now," said the Archbishop.

"And who is it," inquired the Prince sharply, "who has thus played
bo-peep with her intelligence--first shutting and now opening her eyes?"

"When evil is encountered," said his Grace, "instruction has to be
extended."

"And still you have stopped halfway, just at the point where it serves
you best. What does her pure soul know of these problems which to her
are only a few hours old?"

"She is a daughter of the Church; and she knows what the Church's answer
has always been."

"She knows, then," said Max, "what no school of historians has yet been
able to decide! See over in England to-day how the Church, clinging to
its establishment, has to dodge and shuffle over the changes in the
moral law arising out of national habit. Is the Church of Jingalo so
greatly superior, think you, that it can boast?"

At that moment a clock upon the chimney-piece intoned the hour; and the
Arch