“You always did make me feel better. It is your secret.” Then a shadow fell, “But how? Why?” the shadow darkened. “I don’t deserve it!”
The Bishop studied the darkened face with a sad keenness. “You have not told me all the worries this morning, have you? What else?”
Newbold stirred uneasily, then brightened a little with reminiscence, “Odd, how little things take one back sometimes. The mere way we are sitting at this moment,—you, Bishop, in that deep chair with your hands on the arms, and I here at the desk,—it makes me feel as if you might take up the dictating and I my shorthand at any instant.”
“It does not seem to me so very long ago.”
“It strikes me now, that you were pretty patient. I was a raw enough youth when I first came to Westbury.”
“A bit truculent in argument sometimes,” admitted the other, smiling. “You bowled over some of our best doctors in theology. There wasn’t much you were afraid of.”
“On the contrary, I was afraid of everything. It was the first time I had ever been afraid, too. Westbury frightened me.”
“Yet I knew then that you would live to make Westbury proud of you. I believe I never had such hopes for any young man as I had for you.”
“And now?”
“And now?” The Bishop turned the question back upon the man.