Meanwhile Walden himself, ignorant of all the 'local' excitement so suddenly stirred up in his tiny kingdom, had arrived on a three days' visit at the house, or to put it more correctly, at the palace, of his friend Bishop Brent. It was, in strict reality a palace, having been in the old days one of the residences of Henry VII. Much of the building had been injured during the Cromwellian period, and certain modern repairs to its walls had been somewhat clumsily executed, but it still retained numerous fine old mullioned windows, and a cloistered court of many sculptured arches still eminently beautiful, though grey and crumbling under the touch of the melancholy vandal, Time. The Bishop's study had formerly been King Henry's audience chamber, and possessed a richly-wrought ceiling of interlaced oak rafters, and projecting beams smoothly polished at the ends 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.