“Well, you must let me know when he arrives. I have seen my friend at the Colonial Office, and I think your brother is the very man they are looking for.”
I felt my face burning as I replied, “You must hear all my story first, before you recommend him for any post.”
The bishop looked round sharply into my face.
“Oh? Very well,” he said, as we drove up to the door and the conversation was cut short in the bustle of arrival.
It was not until we went for our favourite ramble over the Downs that I got my story told.
Since our last walk there the brilliance of the first new blades of grass had faded, and on the higher slopes there were already some of the browns and yellows of summer, but all the flowers of the field smiled up at us in the heyday of their reproduction, and there were sombre patches of the chocolate-coloured clover that grows there.
I started my narrative and gave the bare facts of the case right through to the end, the bishop asking a question now and then which helped to set things straight in his mind and my own.
Never in trying to think it over had I been able to go straight through like this. My mind had always been diverted into side issues of what might have been, what I ought to have done or said. But now as I told the story to my friend I began to see it straight myself, to appreciate the degrees of blame in all concerned.
Before I had come to the end of the story we were again sitting together looking down on the cool, still mystery of the dew-pond, and the footprints of the last generation of sheep around it.
When I had finished, the bishop said, “What a blessing it is you went!”