Page:The cream of the jest; a comedy of evasions (IA creamofjestcomed00caberich).pdf/131

 *wright—of the Cathedral of the Bleeding Heart—and many dignitaries of his faith journeyed to Lichfield to attend the funeral. Chief among these was a prelate who very long ago had lived in Lichfield, when he was merely a bishop. Kennaston was no little surprised to receive a note informing him that this eminent churchman would be pleased to see Mr. Felix Kennaston that evening at the Bishop's House.

The prelate sat alone in a sparsely furnished, rather dark, and noticeably dusty room. He was like a lean effigy carved in time-yellowed ivory, and his voice was curiously ingratiating. Kennaston recognized with joy that this old man talked like a person in a book, in completed sentences and picked phrases, instead of employing the fragmentary verbal shorthand of ordinary Lichfieldian conversation: and Kennaston, to whom the slovenliness of fairly cultured people's daily talk was always a mystery and an irritant, fell with promptitude into the same tone.

The prelate, it developed, had when he lived in Lichfield known Kennaston's dead uncle—"for whom I had the highest esteem, and whose friend