Her mother was as usual on her sofa near a fire whose heat, that warm day, was mitigated by the windows being wide open. Beside her was her own particular table with the usual flowers, needlework, devotional books, and biographies of good men. It was difficult to believe her mother had got off that sofa nine times to go to bed, had dressed and undressed and had meals—thirty-six of them, counted Ingeborg mechanically, while she looked about for the Bishop, if you excluded the before breakfast tea, forty-five if you didn't—since she saw her last, so immovable did she appear, so exactly in the same position and composed into the same lines as she had been nine days before. The room was full of the singing of thrushes, quite deafeningly full, as she opened the door, for the windows gave straight into the green and soppy garden and it was a day of many worms. Judith was making tea as far away from the fire as she could get, and there was no sign of the Bishop.

"Is that you, Ingeborg?" said her mother, turning her face, grown pale with years of being shut up, to the door.

Ingeborg's mother had found the sofa as other people find salvation. She was not ill. She had simply discovered in it a refuge and a very present help in all the troubles and turmoil of life, and in especial a shield and buckler when it came to dealing with the Bishop. It is not easy for the married, she had found when first casting about for one, to hit on a refuge from each other that shall be honourable to both. In a moment of insight she perceived the sofa. Here was a blameless object that would separate her entirely from duties and responsibilities of every sort. It was respectable; it was unassailably effective; it was not included in the Commandments. All she had to do was to cling to it, and nobody could make her do or be anything. She accordingly got on to it and had stayed there ever since, mysteriously frail, an object of solicitude and sympathy, a being before whose helplessness the most aggressive or aggrieved husband must needs be helpless, too. And she had gradually acquired the sofa look, and was now very definitely a slightly plaintive but persistently patient Christian lady.

"Is that you, Ingeborg?" she said, turning her head.

"Yes, mother," said Ingeborg, hesitating in spite of herself on the threshold.

She looked round anxiously, but the Bishop was not lurking anywhere in the big room.

"Come in, dear, and shut the door. You see the windows are open."

Judith glanced up at her a moment from her tea-making and did not move. Even in the midst of her terrors Ingeborg was astonished, after not having seen it for a while, at her loveliness. She seemed to have taken the sodden greys of the afternoon, the dulness and the gathering dusk, and made out of their gloom the one perfect background for her beauty.

"We thought you would have written," said Mrs. Bullivant, putting her cheek in a position convenient for the kiss that was to be applied to it.

"I—I telegraphed," said Ingeborg, applying the kiss.

"Yes, dear, but only about your train."

"I—thought that was enough."

"But, Ingeborg dear, such a great occasion. One of the great occasions of life. We did expect a little notice, didn't we, Judith?"

"Notice?" said Ingeborg faintly.

"Your father was wounded, dear. He thought it showed so little real love for your parents and your sister."

"But—" said Ingeborg, looking from one to the other.

"We wrote to you at once—directly we knew. Didn't we, Judith?"

"Of course," said Judith.

Ingeborg stood flushing and turning pale. Had one of the Dent's Tour people somehow found out where she lived and written about her engagement and the impossible had happened and they weren't going to mind? Was it possible? Did they know? And were taking it like this? If only she had called at her aunt's house on the way to Paddington and got the letters—what miserable hours of terror she would have been spared!

"But—" she began. Then the immense relief of it suddenly flooded her whole being with a delicious warm softness. They did know. Somehow. And a miracle had happened. Oh, how kind God was!

She dropped on her knees by the sofa and began to kiss her mother's hand, which surprised Mrs. Bullivant; and indeed it is a foreign trick, picked up mostly by those who go abroad. "Mother," she said, "are you really pleased about it? You don't mind then?"

"Mind?" said Mrs. Bullivant.

"Oh, how glad, how glad I am. And father? What does he say? Does he—does he mind?"

"Mind?" repeated Mrs. Bullivant.

"Father is very pleased, I think," said Judith, with what in one less lovely would have been a slight pursing of the lips. And she twisted a remarkable diamond ring she was wearing straight.

"Father is—pleased?" echoed Ingeborg, quite awe-struck by the amount and quality of these reliefs.

"I must say I think it is really good of your dear father to be pleased, when he loses—" began Mrs. Bullivant.

"Oh, yes, yes," interrupted the overcome Ingeborg, "it's a wonder—a wonder of God."

"Ingeborg dear," her mother gently rebuked, for this was excess; and Judith looked still more what would have been a little pursed in any other woman.

"When he loses," then resumed Mrs. Bullivant with the plaintive determination of one who considers it the least she may expect as a sofa-ridden mother to be allowed to finish her sentences, "so much."

"Yes, yes," assented Ingeborg eagerly, whose appreciation of her parents' attitude was so warm that she almost felt she must stay and bask in its urbanity forever and not go away after all to the bleak distance of East Prussia.

"Your father loses not only a daughter," continued Mrs. Bullivant, "but £500 a year of his income."

"Would one call it his income?" inquired Judith, politely but yet, if one could suspect a being with an angel's face of such a thing, with some slight annoyance. "I thought our grandmother—"

"Judith dear, the £500 a year your grandmother left to each of you was only to be yours when you married," explained Mrs. Bullivant, also with some slight annoyance beneath her patience. "Till you married it was to be mine—your father's, I mean, of course. And if you never did marry it would have been mine—I mean his—always."

Ingeborg had heard of her Swedish grandmother's will, but had long ago forgotten it, marriage being remote and money never of any interest to her who had no occasions for spending. Now her heart bounded with yet more thankfulness. What a comfort it would be to Robert. How it would help him in his research. Extraordinary that she should have forgotten it. When he told her of his stipend of five thousand marks—£250 it was in English money, he explained, and there was the house and land free—most of which went in his experiments, but what was left being ample, he said, for the living purposes of reasonable beings if they approached it in a proper spirit, it all depending, he said, on whether they approached it in a proper spirit. "And after all," he had added triumphantly, throwing out his chest just as she was about to inquire what the proper spirit was, "no man can call me thin—"—to think she had forgotten the substantial help she was going to be able to bring him!

The full splendour of her father's generosity in being pleased at her engagement was now revealed to her. The relief of it. The glad, warm relief. So must one feel who is born again, all new, all clean from old mistakes and fears. She felt lifted up, extraordinarily happy, extraordinarily good, more in harmony with Providence and the Bible than she had been since childhood. She would have been willing, and indeed found it perfectly natural, to kneel down with her mother and Judith then and there and say prayers together out loud. She would have been willing on the crest of her wave of gratefulness quite readily to give up Herr Dremmel in return for the family's immense kindness in not asking her to give him up. She had felt nothing like this exaltation before in her life, this complete being in harmony with the infinite, this confidence in the inherent goodness of things, except on the afternoon her tooth was pulled out.

"Oh," she exclaimed, laying her cheek on her mother's hand, "oh, I do hope you'll like Robert!"

"Robert?" said Mrs. Bullivant; and at the tea-table there was a sudden silence among the cups, as though they were holding their breath.

"His name's Robert," said Ingeborg, still with her cheek on her mother's hand, her eyes shut, her face a vision of snuggest, safest contentment.

"What Robert, Ingeborg?" inquired Mrs. Bullivant, shifting her position to stare down more conveniently at her daughter.

"Herr Dremmel. It's his Christian name. He's got to have one, you know," said Ingeborg, still with her eyes shut in the blissfulness of perfect confidence.

"Herr who?" said Mrs. Bullivant, a sharper note of life in her voice than there had been for years. "Here's your father," she added quickly, hastily composing herself into the lines of the unassailable invalid again as the door opened and the Bishop came in.

Ingeborg jumped up. "Oh, father," she cried, running to him with the entire want of shyness one may conceive in the newly washed and forgiven soul when it first arrives in heaven and meets its Maker and knows there are going to be no more misunderstandings for ever, "how good you've been!"

And she kissed him so fervently in a room gone so silent that the kiss sounded quite loud.

The Bishop was nettled.

Was he then at any time not good? His daughter's excessive gratitude, really almost noisy gratitude, for what after all had been inevitable, the permission to go up to London and place herself in the hands of a dentist, suggested that humaneness on his part came to her as a surprise. He did feel he had been good to let her go, but he also felt he would have been not good if he had not let her go. Certainly Redchester opinion would have condemned him as cruel even if he himself, who knew all the circumstances, was not able to think so. What had really been cruel was the terrible muddle his papers and letters had got into owing to her prolonged absence. Grave dislocations had taken place in the joints of his engagements, several with far-reaching results; and all because, he could not help feeling, Ingeborg, in spite of precept and example, did not in her earlier years use her toothbrush with regularity and conscientiousness. Manifestly she did not, or how could she have needed nine enormous days to be set in repair? He himself, who regarded his body as a holy temple, which was the one solution of the body question that at all approached satisfactoriness, and had accordingly brushed his teeth, from the point of view of their being pillars of a sacred edifice, after every meal for forty years, had never had a toothache in his life.

"Let us hope now, Ingeborg," he said, reflecting on the instance she had provided of the modern inversion of the Mosaic law which visited the sins of the fathers on the children, the original arrangement, the Bishop felt, being considerably healthier, and gently putting her away in order to go over to the tea-table where he stood holding out his hand for the cup Judith hastened to place in it, "let us now hope, now you have had your lesson, that in future you will remember cleanliness is next to godliness."

And this seemed to Ingeborg an answer so surprising that she could only stare at him with her mouth fallen a little open, there where he had left her in the middle of the carpet.

But the Bishop had not done. He went on to say another thing that surprised her still more; nay, smote her cold, shook her to her foundations. He said, after a pause during which the silence in the room was remarkable, his back turned to her while at the tea-table he carefully selected the particular piece of bread and butter he intended to eat, "And pray, Ingeborg, why did you not write the moment you heard from us, and congratulate your sister on her engagement?"