"Felicity," her friend broke out excitedly, "there's something here I don't understand. You don't mean to tell me you actually allow that man to call on you!"
Miss Wycliffe opened her eyes in astonishment. "What a goose you are, Ella! He came to see father. I had n't time to find out what he wanted when you nearly frightened me out of my wits."
Mrs. Parr, only partially convinced, was forced to accept the explanation; and though her eyes adumbrated reproach, she dared not say more. She remembered, however, the picture of Leigh and Felicity going off together in the moonlight the previous evening, and was reassured. In fact, she had run in to gossip about the young man, and to sound his praises with design, but the situation she encountered at her entering had revived her old suspicions concerning Emmet. Now she told herself that they were merely a habit of mind, without justification. She recalled the mayor's emotion as he bent over Lena, his averted face when he returned for his hat, and plunged at once into an account of the episode at the inn, which she had hitherto kept to herself. Before long they were discussing the probable nature of the tie between Emmet and Lena with apparently equal interest and conjecture.
About this time, the bishop, coming from Dr. Renshaw's office, met Leigh face to face on the walk as he was returning to his room from a recitation, and stopped to speak to him.
"Mr. Leigh," he remarked, with an observant twinkle in his eyes, "you look as if last night's experience had been too much for you."
"We had enough strenuous excitement to keep any one awake," was the reply. "It was too violent a break in my monastic life."
The bishop's smile widened; his innuendo had been skilfully parried. "When you get to be my age," he said, "you will doubtless take your politics more calmly. I never lose sleep now over the vicissitudes of those whom the fickle crowd has raised to honour. How does the line run? Hunc, si mobilium turba Quiritium—but you probably remember your Horace better than I do."
It was one of Bishop Wycliffe's little perversities to quote Latin at the devotees of science, and to maintain an ironical assumption of their appreciation.
"I don't remember a word of my Horace," Leigh declared. It was not the first time he had given the bishop the same information, and this fact lent emphasis to his tone.
"Too bad, too bad," the old man murmured. "I fear the rising generation has no atmosphere." And he went on his way, chuckling genially.