The front sitting room was usually kept closed. Mrs. Bagot went in there every day to attend to her collection of ferns, which she kept on a table in the window. This morning she had cleared the table of its ferns, and it stood transformed now, with a white lace-edged cloth covering it, and the white china tea things shining in the light from the fire. The fire made the room very cozy. It was late May, a temperate day, but Mrs. Bagot knew that priests returning to Ireland from South Africa felt the change in the climate very much, and besides, the Bishop was a very old man. The Bishop and Mrs. Bagot’s father had been the same age, and they had gone to school and grown up together on neighboring farms in Wexford. Mrs. Bagot’s father had died when she was two years old, and she always felt her childhood had ended then, before it began. As far back as she could remember, she and her older sister and her brothers had been like little men and women, citizens of a republic where her mother was the stern, distant, and all-seeing head. It was said that Mrs. Kelly, Mrs. Bagot’s mother, had never got over her husband’s death. She was a silent, unsmiling widow, and the mantle of grief she drew about herself and her children became a substitute for the protection they had lost at his death, and, after that, it became a symbol of his will. Mrs. Kelly’s children always did as they were told.

Mrs. Bagot wanted to ask the Bishop about her father. She wanted to hear someone tell her once again that she had been her father’s favorite. She had heard it often enough, from her mother, and from her sister and her brothers. Mrs. Bagot had been told what a favorite she used to be all during the time when she was a child and when she was growing up, and she had got tired of hearing it, but all of a sudden she wanted to hear it said again. She hoped the Bishop would remember she had been her father’s favorite, and that he would say so. But the Bishop was very old. He might have begun to forget.

She had bought a white iced cake for the tea, not trusting her own confectionery, and she had made bread, brown and white, and scones. And she had jam, and honey in the comb. She wished he would come. She was getting nervous waiting for him.