and painted with royal emblems, from which projections no doubt, in early periods, many a banner of triumph had floated and many a knightly pennon.  Bishop Brent was fond of this room, and carefully maintained its ancient character in the style of its furniture and general surroundings.  The wide angle-nook and high carved chimney-piece, supported by two sculptured angel-figures of heroic size, was left unmodernised, and in winter the gaping recess was filled with great logs blazing cheerily as in olden times, but in summer, as now, it served as a picturesque setting for masses of rare flowers which, growing in pots, or cut freshly and set in crystal vases, were grouped together with the greatest taste and artistic selection of delicate colouring, forming, as it seemed, a kind of blossom-wreathed shrine, above which, against the carved chimney itself, hung a wonderfully impressive picture of the Virgin and Child.  Placed below this, and slightly towarde the centre of the room, was the Bishop’s table-desk and chair, arranged so that whenever he raised his head from his work, the serene soft eyes of Mary, Blessed among Women, should mystically meet his own.  And here just now he sat at evening, deep in conversation with John Walden, who with the perfect unselfishness which was an ingrained part of his own nature, had for the time put aside or forgotten all his own little troubles, in order to listen to the greater ones of his friend.  He had been shocked at the change wrought in seven years on Brent’s form and features.  Always thin, he had now become so attenuated as to have reached almost a point of emaciation,—­his dark eyes, sunk far back under his shelving brows, blazed with a feverish brilliancy which gave an almost unearthly expression to his pale drawn features, and his hand, thin, long, and delicate as a woman’s, clenched and unclenched itself nervously when he spoke, with an involuntary force of which he was himself unconscious.

“You have not aged much, Walden!” he said, thoughtfully regarding his old college chum’s clear and open countenance with a somewhat sad smile—­“Your eyes are the same blue eyes of the boy that linked his arm through mine so long ago and walked with me through the sleepy old streets of ‘Alma Mater!’ That time seems quite close to me sometimes—­and again sometimes far away—­dismally, appallingly, far away!”

He sighed.  Walden looked at him a little anxiously, but for the moment said nothing.

“You give me no response,”—­continued Brent, with sudden querulousness—­“Since you arrived we have been talking nothing but generalities and Church matters.  Heavens, how sick I am of Church matters!  Yet I know you see a change in me.  I am sure you do—­and you will not say it.  Now you never were secretive—­you never said one thing and meant another—­so speak the truth as you have always done!  I am changed, am I not?”

“You are,”—­replied Walden, steadily—­“But I cannot tell how, or in what way.  You look ill and worn out.  You are overworked and overwrought—­but I think there is something else at the root of the evil;—­something that has happened during the last seven years.  You are not quite the man you were when you came to consecrate my church at St. Rest.”