Reaching the inn at Wiek at ten o'clock on the Sunday night I went straight and very softly to bed; and leaving the inn at Wiek at eight o'clock on the Monday morning I might have got away without ever seeing Mrs. Harvey-Browne again if the remembrance of Brosy's unvarying kindness had not stirred me to send Gertrud up with a farewell message.
Mrs. Harvey-Browne, having heard all about my day on the Bertha from the landlady, and how I had come back in the unimpeachability of singleness, the Professor safely handed over to his wife, forgave the chin-chucking, forgave the secret setting out, and hurried on to the landing in a wrapper, warmth in her heart and honey on her lips.
'What, you are leaving us, dear Frau X.?' she called over the baluster. 'So early? So suddenly? I can't come down to you—do come up here. Why didn't you tell me you were going to-day?' she continued when I had come up, holding my hand in both hers, speaking with emphatic cordiality, an altogether melted and mellifluous bishop's wife.
'I hadn't quite decided. I fear I must go home to-day. They want me badly.'
'That I can quite understand—of course they want their little ray of sunshine,' she cried, growing more and more mellifluous. 'Now tell me,' she went on, stroking the hand she held, 'when are you coming to see us all at Babbacombe?'
Babbacombe! Heavens. When indeed? Never, never, never, shrieked my soul. 'Oh thanks,' murmured my lips, 'how kind you are. But—do you think the bishop would like me?'
'The bishop? He would more than like you, dear Frau X.—he would positively glory in you.'
'Glory in me?' I faintly gasped; and a gaudy vision of the bishop glorying, that bishop of whom I had been taught to think as steeped in chronic sorrow, swam before my dazzled eyes. 'How kind you are. But I'm afraid you are too kind. I'm afraid he would soon see there wasn't anything to make him glory and much to make him grieve.'
'Well, well, we mustn't be so modest. Of course the bishop knows we are all human, and so must have our little faults. But I can assure you he would be delighted to make your acquaintance. He is a most large-minded man. Now promise.'
I murmured confused thanks and tried to draw my hand away, but it was held tight. 'I shall miss the midday train at Bergen if I don't go at once,' I appealed—'I really must go.'