“The words don't matter,” he remarked.
“No, they don't, of course.” Withery's mind, trained through the busy years to the sort of informal confessional familiar to priests of other than the Roman church, was clearing itself of the confusions of friendship and was ready to dismiss, for the time, philosophically; the sense of personal loss.
“Is it something you've done, Grigg?” he asked now, gently. “Have you—”
Doane threw out an interrupting hand.
“No,” he said rather shortly, “I've not broken the faith, Henry, not in act.”
“In your thoughts only?”
“Yes. There.”
“It is doubt?... Strange, Grigg, I never knew a man whose faith had in it such vitality. You've inspired thousands. Tens of thousands. You—I will say this, now—you, nothing more, really, than my thoughts of you carried me through my bad time. Through those doldrums when the ardor of the first few years had burned out and I was spent, emotionally. It was with your help that I found my feet again. You never knew' that.”
“No. I didn't know that.”
“I worried a good deal, then. I had never before been aware of the church as a worldly organization, as a political mechanism. I hadn't questioned it. It was Hidderleigh's shrewd campaign for the bishopric that disturbed me. Then the money raised questions, of course.”