Presently he had turned up his light, and was prowling about the room.
The clear inky dinginess that comes before the raw dawn of a spring
morning, found his white face at the window, looking out upon the great
terrace and the park.




CHAPTER THE SECOND - THE WEAR AND TEAR OF EPISCOPACY

(1)


IT was only in the last few years that the bishop had experienced
these nervous and mental crises. He was a belated doubter. Whatever
questionings had marked his intellectual adolescence had either been
very slight or had been too adequately answered to leave any serious
scars upon his convictions.

And even now he felt that he was afflicted physically rather than
mentally, that some protective padding of nerve-sheath or brain-case had
worn thin and weak, and left him a prey to strange disturbances, rather
than that any new process of thought was eating into his mind. These
doubts in his mind were still not really doubts; they were rather alien
and, for the first time, uncontrolled movements of his intelligence.
He had had a sheltered upbringing; he was the well-connected son of
a comfortable rectory, the only son and sole survivor of a family
of three; he had been carefully instructed and he had been a willing
learner; it had been easy and natural to take many things for granted.
It had been very easy and pleasant for him to take the world as he found