ayed only by an increasing tendency towards vagueness, symbolism,
poetry and toleration. Eleanor seemed satisfied with his exposition; she
did not press for further enlightenment. She continued all her outward
conformities except that after a time she ceased to communicate; and in
September she went away to Newnham. Her doubts had not visibly affected
Clementina or her other sisters, and the bishop made no further attempts
to explore the spiritual life of his family below the surface of its
formal acquiescence.

As a matter of fact his own spiritual wrestlings were almost exclusively
nocturnal. During his spells of insomnia he led a curiously double
existence. In the daytime he was largely the self he had always been,
able, assured, ecclesiastical, except that he was a little jaded and
irritable or sleepy instead of being quick and bright; he believed in
God and the church and the Royal Family and himself securely; in
the wakeful night time he experienced a different and novel self, a
bare-minded self, bleakly fearless at its best, shamelessly weak at its
worst, critical, sceptical, joyless, anxious. The anxiety was quite the
worst element of all. Something sat by his pillow asking grey questions:
"What are you doing? Where are you going? Is it really well with the
children? Is it really well with the church? Is it really well with the
country? Are you indeed doing anything at all? Are you anything more
than an actor wearing a costume in an archaic play? The people turn
their backs on you."

He would twist over on his pillow. He would whisper hymns and prayers
that had the quality of charms.

"He giveth his Beloved sleep"; that answered many times, and many times
it failed.

The labour troubles of 1912 eased off as the year wore on, and the
bitterness of the local press over the palace abated very considerably.
Indeed there was something like a watery gleam of popularity when he
brought down his consistent friend, the dear old Princess Christiana of
Hoch and Unter, black bonnet, deafness, and all, to open a new wing of
the children's hospital. The Princhester conservative paper took the
occasion to inform the diocese that he was a fluent German scholar and
consequently a persona grata with the royal aunts, and that the Princess
Christiana was merely just one of a number of royalties now practically
at the beck and call of Princhester. It was not true, but it was very
effective locally, and seemed to justify a little