ten o'clock in the morning
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 .