"Old!" Cardington echoed ruefully. "My dear bishop! And you baptised my infant head after you came to your Episcopal office!"
"Ah, but I was young then," the bishop retorted, "or I should never have assumed that responsibility."
They were still laughing at this sally when the maid appeared in the door to announce that dinner was served. Seeing a late caller, she hesitated, and Cardington broke in.
"I must go now," he announced. "Remember, Miss Felicity, not to overdo the matter of eating sweetmeats. There would be a certain unnecessary redundancy in such an indulgence, a carrying of coals to Newcastle, so to speak."
"No, you must stay to dinner," she urged, "and afterward smoke one of father's cigars to solace you for the loss of the box you might have had if the election had gone the other way."
"Might have had!" he retorted. "You mean would have had. I hope there was no doubt of your intention to pay your honest debts."
"Come," the bishop interrupted, taking him by the arm and marching him away, "enough of these quibbles. You must stay, of course."
"But this is the irony of fate," he continued, glancing back fondly at his daughter, "that in spite of all my preaching, I have not been able to convince the one nearest me of the iniquity of gambling."
"I am reminded of that historic occasion," Cardington answered, "when you preached a sermon against the putting on of apparel and the plaiting of the hair, and extolled the inward adornment of a meek and quiet spirit, quoting St. Peter and Tertullian with singular effect"--
"But how was I to know," Miss Wycliffe put in, "that the return of that sermon from the bottom of the barrel would coincide with the appearance of my new hat?"
"It was just that lack of cooperation between you and your right reverend father which scandalised the congregation," Cardington commented.
"It was a beautiful hat," she mused regretfully. "Every one admired it."
"Yes, yes," said the bishop. "'And a man's foes shall be they of his own household.'"
Strange to say, this quotation, so lightly uttered, was destined to strike the keynote of the dinner. The subject of the mayor-elect was too vividly present in the minds of all three to be long absent from their conversation, and a discussion inevitably followed a reminder from Cardington that this was the evening in which the people were to celebrate their victory by a procession. Miss Wycliffe jestingly proposed an illumination of the house; but her father's patience with her perversity was exhausted. Doubtless the triumph of the cause he hated intensified his emotion. Had the judge been elected, he could easily have been magnanimous, or could have twitted her with good humour. But there comes a time, even to the most philosophical parent, when the independent judgment of a child seems a personal affront, an ingratitude "sharper than a serpent's tooth." He loved the beautiful old city in which his life had been spent, and wished to see it ruled always by men of his own class. To him the outcome of the election was really a significant calamity, the beginning of the end of the aristocratic democracy he cherished. Not Lincoln, the dissenter and man of the people, but Washington, the gentleman and Churchman, was his ideal of an American statesman. It is perhaps not too much to say that he would prefer to see the wheels of government falter for a while in the hands of an aristocrat rather than to see them turn smoothly under the propelling power of a plebeian, were it in his suffrage to make the choice.