"I'm off into the country to visit for a few hours," said the bishop, introducing him. "You can come if you like, but it's not a good road, and I would advise you to stay where you are. Joe will take you fishing and there is plenty to read in the bookshelf. I can recommend Henry Drummond or Marcus Aurelius. Good-by!"
He drove off in a rattling buckboard, and the woods swallowed him. A little crowd had gathered in the dock, glancing after the bishop and then down at the slender deck of the Evangeline. The stranger looked up at them, nodded and disappeared. Presently Joe stretched an awning over the long boom of the main mast, and Clark sat in the shade listening to the silence and surveying this isolated village. What, he wondered, could keep people in so forgotten a community, with its unpaved street, its straggling wooden houses, its background of unbroken bush. There was no water power, no big timber, and, from the look of the country, no mineral. He put the thought out of his mind with luxurious deliberation and tried to decipher why a man like the bishop should waste his time here when, without doubt, he could be a shining light in a great city. After a little the reason became clear, and, smiling to himself, he reached up for Marcus Aurelius.
They supped that night at the parsonage, where they yielded to the stark simplicity of new surroundings. The parson with his wife and children regarded the bishop with their eyes in which love and reverence were clearly mingled. At the stranger they looked a little insecurely, for the bishop had, that afternoon, told who he was. They had heard of him already, and in this remote village his person had been invested with mysterious powers. He was a force of which they read, rather than a living, breathing man, so that however he might try to talk affably and communicably, he found himself hedged about with a spiny growth of fame that the others made but little attempt to penetrate. His garment of authority and influence was too great. He was too big and didn't fit.
Later came service in the bare, wooden church, and for the second time he saw the prelate in robes of office. The sun was setting and its level beams filled the tiny edifice with a softened glow. Overhead the sky was like a benison, while the bishop spoke words of cheer and strength that went straight to the hearts of his congregation. He stood, as he always stood, in front of the chancel, a great figure in white and scarlet, with a deep mellow voice that seemed to dissolve in the hush of evening like a lingering caress. Clark, in his corner, sat motionless, touched as he had seldom been touched before. He began to see why the bishop spent his life in this wilderness.