“Kaiomi,” answered Nicholas after reflection.

“You can sing, can’t you?” asks O’Flynn.

“Sing?  No, me dance!”

The Boy roared with delight.

“Why, yes, I never thought of that.  You fellows do the songs, and Nicholas and I’ll do the dances.”

Mac glowered angrily.  “Look here:  if you don’t mind being blasphemous for yourself, don’t demoralise the natives.”

“Well, I like that!  Didn’t Miriam dance before the Lord?  Why shouldn’t Nicholas and me?”

The Colonel cleared his throat, and began to read the lessons for the day.  The natives sat and watched him closely.  They really behaved very well, and the Boy was enormously proud of his new friends.  There was a great deal at stake.  The Boy felt he must walk warily, and he already regretted those light expressions about dancing before the Lord.  All the fun of the winter might depend on a friendly relation between Pymeut and the camp.  It was essential that the Esquimaux should not only receive, but make, a good impression.

The singing “From Greenland’s icy mountains to India’s coral strand” seemed to please them; but when, after the Colonel’s “Here endeth the second lesson,” Mac said, in sepulchral tones, “Let us pray,” the visitors seemed to think it was time to go home.

“No,” said Mac sternly, “they mustn’t go in the middle of the meeting”; and he proceeded to kneel down.

But Nicholas was putting on his fur coat, and the others only waited to follow him out.  The Boy, greatly concerned lest, after all, the visit should end badly, dropped on his knees to add the force of his own example, and through the opening phrases of Mac’s prayer the agnostic was heard saying, in a loud stage-whisper, “Do like me—­down!  Look here!  Suppose you ask us come big feast, and in the middle of your dance we all go home—.

“Oh no,” remonstrated Nicholas.

“Very well.  These friends o’ mine no like man go home in the middle.  They heap mad at me when I no stay.  You savvy?”

“Me savvy,” says Nicholas slowly and rather depressed.

“Kneel down, then,” says the Boy.  And first Nicholas, and then the others, went on their knees.

Alternately they looked in the Boy’s corner where the grub was, and then over their shoulders at the droning Mac and back, catching the Boy’s eye, and returning his reassuring nods and grins.

Mac, who had had no innings up to this point, was now embarked upon a most congenial occupation.  Wrestling with the Lord on behalf of the heathen, he lost count of time.  On and on the prayer wound its slow way; involution after involution, coil after coil, like a snake, the Boy thought, lazing in the sun.  Unaccustomed knees grew sore.

“Hearken to the cry of them that walk in darkness, misled by wolves in sheep’s clothing—­wolves, Lord, wearing the sign of the Holy Cross—­”

O’Flynn shuffled, and Mac pulled himself up.  No light task this of conveying to the Creator, in covert terms, a due sense of the iniquity of the Jesuits, without, at the same time, stirring O’Flynn’s bile, and seeing him get up and stalk out of meeting, as had happened once before.