



Produced by David Widger





THE INSIDE OF THE CUP

By Winston Churchill



Volume 8.


XXVII.  RETRIBUTION
XXVIII. LIGHT



CHAPTER XXVII

RETRIBUTION


I

The Bishop's House was a comfortable, double dwelling of a smooth,
bright red brick and large, plate-glass windows, situated in a plot
at the western end of Waverley Place. It had been bought by the Diocese
in the nineties, and was representative of that transitional period in
American architecture when the mansard roof had been repudiated, when
as yet no definite types had emerged to take its place. The house had
pointed gables, and a tiny and utterly useless porch that served only to
darken the front door, made of heavy pieces of wood fantastically curved.

It was precisely ten o'clock in the morning when Hodder rang the bell and
was shown into the ample study which he had entered on other and less
vital occasions. He found difficulty in realizing that this pleasant
room, lined with well-worn books and overlooking a back lawn where the
clothes of the episcopal family hung in the yellow autumn sun, was to be
his judgment seat, whence he might be committed to trial for heresy.

And this was the twentieth century! The full force of the preposterous
fact smote him, and a consciousness of the distance he himself had
travelled since the comparatively recent days of his own orthodoxy.
And suddenly he was full again of a resentful impatience, not only that
he should be called away from his labours, his cares, the strangers who
were craving his help, to answer charges of such an absurd triviality,
but that the performance of the great task to which he had set his hand,
with God's help, should depend upon it. Would his enemies be permitted
to drive him out thus easily?

