"The country grows too fast, your grace. There seems no escape from expansion."
"Yet you find time for all of your work?"
Kimberly made a deprecatory gesture. "My chief affair is to find men to do my work for me. Personally, I am fairly free."
"From all save responsibility, perhaps. I know how hard it is to delegate that. And you give all of your energy to business. You have no family?"
"No, and this brings me to the object of my visit." Kimberly paused a moment. "I shall soon enter into marriage."
"Ah, I see!"
"And the subject is a difficult one to lay before your grace."
The archbishop saw an indefinable embarrassment in his visitor's manner and raised his thin hand. "Then it has every claim to sympathetic consideration. Forget for a moment that I am almost a stranger--I am certainly no stranger to difficulties. And do no longer address me formally. I said a moment ago that I was glad to meet you if only to thank you for your responses to our numerous needs. But there is another reason.
"When I was a young man, first ordained, my charge was the little village of Sunbury up in the lake country. You may imagine how familiar the Kimberly estates became to me in my daily rounds of exercise. I heard much of your people. Some of their households were of my congregation. Your mother I never met. I used to hear of her as exceedingly frail in health. Once, at least, I recall seeing her driving. But her servants at The Towers were always instructed not alone to offer me flowers for the altar but diligently to see that the altar was generously provided from her gardens and hot-houses.
"I once learned," the archbishop's head drooped slightly in the reminiscence and his eyes rested full upon his visitor, "that she was passing through a dreaded ordeal, concerning which many feared for her. It was on a Sunday before mass that the word came to me. And at the mass I told my little flock that the patroness to whom we owed our constant offering of altar flowers was passing that morning through the valley of the shadow of death, and I asked them to pray for her with me. You were born on a Sunday, Mr. Kimberly." Kimberly did not break the silence and the archbishop spoke on. "You see I am quite old enough myself to be your father. I remember reading an account of your baptism."