He sighed deeply, "A bishop? I ought to have—I might have been—everything, anything—save for this cursed place and my own weakness. But doubtless," he added, hypocritically, "it is a just decree of Providence that has decided thus. But it is hard sometimes. There are two natures in us, occasionally, and the one vanquishes and overwhelms the other. In me," and here he began to laugh, "the fisherman for pilchards has got the better of the fisherman for souls."
"Fishing appears to have wondrous attractions," I answered negligently.
He turned and looked at me scrutinisingly. "We have all had the passion, we Brandlings," he said, "except that superfine gentleman yonder," nodding at Eustace. And added, in a loud, emphatic voice, "And none of us has been a more devoted fisherman, you will admit, dear Eustace, than your lamented father."
Eustace, I thought, turned pale, but it might have been the greenish light through the bottle-glass windows of the little church, on whose damp floor we three were standing before the tombs of the Brandlings of former times, quaint pyramids of kneeling figures, sons and daughters tapering downwards from the kneeling father and mother; and recumbent knights, obliterated by centuries in the ruined roofless chapel, so that the dog at their feet, the sword by their side, let alone their poor washed features, were scarce distinguishable....
"They look like drowned people," I said, and indeed the green light through the trees and the bottle glass, and the greenish damp stains all round, made the church seem like a sea cave, with the sea moaning round it.
"Where have you seen drowned people, Penelope?" asked Eustace, and I felt a little reproved for the horridness of my imaginings.
"Nowhere," I hastily answered; "just a fancy that passed through my head. And you said there are so many wrecks on this coast, you know."
"We are all wrecks on the ocean of Time," remarked the Reverend Hubert, "overwhelmed by its flood."
"You are the bishop now," I laughed, "not the pilchard fisher," and we went through the damp churchyard of huddled grassy mounds and crooked gravestones under the big trees of the glen.
"Eustace," I said that evening, "I wish I might not be buried down there," and then, considering that all his ancestors were, I felt sorry.