"I should have preferred to put it that I have accepted great tasks and
heavy responsibilities--and that I am not my own master."
The Dean watched him closely. Across the field of imagination there
passed the figure of one who "went away sorrowful, having
great possessions," and his heart--the heart of a child or a
knight-errant--burned within him.
But before he could speak again the door of the room opened and a lady
in black entered. Ashe turned towards her.
"Do you forbid me, William?" she said, quietly--"or may I join your
conversation?"
Ashe held out his hand and drew her to him. Lady Tranmore greeted her
old friend the Dean, and he looked at her overcome with emotion and
doubt.
"You have come to us at a critical moment," he said--"and I am afraid
you are against me."
She asked what they had been discussing, though, indeed, as she said,
she partly guessed. And the Dean, beginning to be shaken in his own
cause, repeated his pleadings with a sinking heart. They sounded to him
stranger and less persuasive than before. In doing what he had done he
had been influenced by an instinctive feeling that Ashe would not treat
the wrong done him as other men might treat it; that, to put it at the
least, he would be able to handle it with an ethical originality, to
separate himself in dealing with it from the mere weight of social
tradition.
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