"What's the matter with the girl?" the bishop asked, when the door had closed behind her. There was an odd blending of annoyance and compassion in his tone.
"Lena hasn't been well," his daughter replied, "for some days."
"Then let her rest awhile," he said; "and call the doctor, if it's necessary." The incident seemed to distract him entirely from his previous thoughts. "It is just such a scene as this," he continued, "that reminds one of the hidden tragedies going on all the time in the lives about us. Lena is usually a very quiet and skilful girl, and it has been a pleasure to have her about. Perhaps she's going through some love affair, as big a thing in her existence as the chief events in ours are to us. Girls of that class so often acquire a certain gentleness and breeding from association, and then marry some rough coal-heaver or mechanic. It's a pity—a great pity."
"She's pretty enough to meet a King Cophetua," Cardington remarked judicially.
The observation was directed at Miss Wycliffe, and was an effort to make her forget the conversation in which his animus had led him to transgress even his elastic limits with her. There was something almost comical in the concerned expression of his light blue eyes, no longer fierce, as he gazed at her. But she met this dumb appeal coldly.
"If you will excuse me, father," she said presently, "I 'll go up to Lena's room, and see whether she 's really ill."
The two men, left alone, drank their coffee, and then went into the bishop's study to smoke. As the door remained open, Cardington seated himself in a chair that commanded a vista of the drawing-room, and lingered on in the hope of Felicity's return, until the first lights of Emmet's triumphal procession began to flash past the windows from the street beyond.
"Here comes the Imperator up the Via Sacra!" he commented, rising. "I must go out and see whether he has a slave behind him to whisper in his ear, Memento te hominem esse."
But it would appear that his curiosity concerning the procession was short-lived, for when he reached the scene, he plunged contemptuously between the straggling columns, and gained the further curb. Then he turned down a side street, without one backward look, and took his way forlornly toward St. George's Hall.
The bishop, not sorry to be left to his meditations, had made no effort to detain his visitor. Now he extended his hand for another cigar, changed his mind, and sat thinking. Genuinely indifferent to the procession passing by with torches and transparencies and bands of music, he remained with his back toward the windows, his head sunk upon his breast. He was steept in a depressing consciousness of having mismanaged the situation with his daughter, of having widened the breach he had meant to close. His tact had failed him because his affections and interests were too intimately concerned, much as a surgeon's hand might falter in an operation upon one of his own family.