n which he lay. The lamp had a tilted shade that threw
a slanting bar of shadow across the field of reflection, lighting a
right-angled triangle very brightly and leaving the rest obscure. The
bed was a very great one, a bed for the Anakim. It had a canopy with
yellow silk curtains, surmounted by a gilded crown of carved wood.
Between the curtains was a man's face, clean-shaven, pale, with
disordered brown hair and weary, pale-blue eyes. He was clad in purple
pyjamas, and the hand that now ran its fingers through the brown hair
was long and lean and shapely.

Beside the bed was a convenient little table bearing the light, a
water-bottle and glass, a bunch of keys, a congested pocket-book, a
gold-banded fountain pen, and a gold watch that indicated a quarter past
three. On the lower edge of the picture in the mirror appeared the back
of a gilt chair, over which a garment of peculiar construction had been
carelessly thrown. It was in the form of that sleeveless cassock of
purple, opening at the side, whose lower flap is called a bishop's
apron; the corner of the frogged coat showed behind the chair-back, and
the sash lay crumpled on the floor. Black doeskin breeches, still warmly
lined with their pants, lay where they had been thrust off at the corner
of the bed, partly covering black hose and silver-buckled shoes.

For a moment the tired gaze of the man in the bed rested upon these
evidences of his episcopal dignity. Then he turned from them to the
watch at the bedside.

He groaned helplessly.

(4)

These country doctors were no good. There wasn't a physician in the
diocese. He must go to London.

He looked into the weary eyes of his reflection and said, as one makes a
reassuring promise, "London."

He was being worried. He was being intolerably worried, and he was ill
and unable to sustain his positions. This doubt, this sudden discovery
of controversial unsoundness, was only one aspect of his general
neurasthenia. It had been creeping into his mind since the "Light Unden
the Altar" controversy. Now suddenly it had leapt upon him from his own
unwary lips.

The immediate trouble arose from his loyalty. He had followed the King's
example; he had become a total abstainer and, in addition, on his own
account he had ceased to smoke. And his digestion, which Princhester
had first made sensitive, was deranged. He was suffering chemically,
suffering one of those nameless sequences of maladjustments that still
defy