“Courage to reopen the Southside Mission, and to keep it open,—and every mission throughout the diocese! Let him know that Westbury stands by him there!”
“But if—” she spoke low, “if it doesn’t?”
There was a stab of pain on the Bishop’s face, and then bright hope, “Let him know you do! That will be enough! And besides,” he smiled, “can you not make Westbury do whatever you wish?”
“I never tried,” she answered musingly, “to make Westbury do anything it did not wish.”
“I cannot believe,” he cried, “that it wishes the closing of the mission. There has been somehow a mistake. It cannot be. It would mean the going out of a lamp which you and I saw kindled,—it does not seem to me so very long ago.”
“It is a lifetime.”
The light died from the Bishop’s face, leaving on it all the cruelty of age. “Yes, a lifetime that is over,” for a moment his lips showed their palsied working, for a moment spoke an old man’s querulousness, “they could not have closed the mission without my knowing it, if they had not thought me, already, laid upon the shelf!”
“Henry,” she pleaded, “not that, please!”
“No, not that!” he cried, instantly himself and contrite, “we pass, but the work goes on! I am an old man who has somehow made a failure of it. But I’ll try not to think of that any more, clouding our Christmasing. I’ll try just to remember I am leaving Murray Newbold and Westbury, the two I have loved, to you.”
“Leaving! But, Henry, you speak as if I were not also old! What time have I left, for Newbold, for Westbury, more than you?”