“And after to-morrow,” the Bishop remarked with a smile, “I suppose he will not be alone.”
She pressed his arm.
“It is very wonderful to think about,” she said quietly. “I am going to try and be Julian’s secretary—whilst we are away, at any rate.”
“It isn’t often,” the Bishop reflected, “that I have the chance of a few minutes’ quiet conversation, on the day before her wedding, with the woman whom I am going to marry to the man I think most of on earth.”
“Give me some good advice,” she begged.
The Bishop shook his head.
“You don’t need it,” he said. “A wife who loves her husband needs very few words of admonition. There are marriages so often in which one can see the rocks ahead that one opens one’s prayer-book, even, with a little tremor of fear. But with you and Julian it is different.”
“There is nothing that a woman can do for the man whom she loves,” she declared softly, “which I shall not try to do for Julian.”
They paced up and down for a few moments in silence. The Bishop’s step was almost buoyant. He seemed to have lost all that weary load of anxiety which had weighed him down during the last few months. Catherine, too, in her becoming grey furs, her face flushed with excitement, had the air of one who has thrown all anxiety to the winds.
“Julian’s gift of speech must have surprised even himself,” the Bishop remarked. “Of course, we always knew that ‘Paul Fiske’, when he was found, must be a brilliant person, but I don’t think that even Julian himself had any suspicion of his oratorical powers.”