appendage of adolescence, and is the cause of half the extravagant affection at which maturity is wont to laugh.  In the company of Cyril, Mark felt ineffably old than which upon the threshold of sixteen there is no sensation more grateful; and while the intercourse flattered his own sense of superiority he did feel that he had much to offer his friend.  Mark regarded Cyril’s case as curable if the right treatment were followed, and every evening after school during the veiled summer of a fine October he paced the Slowbridge streets with his willing proselyte, debating the gravest issues of religious practice, the subtlest varieties of theological opinion.  He also lent Cyril suitable books, and finally he demanded from him as a double tribute to piety and friendship that he should prove his metal by going to Confession.  Cyril, who was incapable of refusing whatever Mark demanded, bicycled timorously behind him to Meade Cantorum one Saturday afternoon, where he gulped out the table of his sins to Mr. Ogilvie, whom Mark had fetched from the Vicarage with the urgency of one who fetches a midwife.  Nor was he at all abashed when Mr. Ogilvie was angry for not having been told that Cyril’s father would have disapproved of his son’s confession.  He argued that the priest was applying social standards to religious principles, and in the end he enjoyed the triumph of hearing Mr. Ogilvie admit that perhaps he was right.

“I know I’m right.  Come on, Cyril.  You’d better get back home now.  Oh, and I say, Mr. Ogilvie, can I borrow for Cyril some of the books you lent me?”

The priest was amused that Mark did not ask him to lend the books to his friend, but to himself.  However, when he found that the neophyte seemed to flourish under Mark’s assiduous priming, and that the fundamental weakness of his character was likely to be strengthened by what, though it was at present nothing more than an interest in religion, might later on develop into a profound conviction of the truths of Christianity, Ogilvie overlooked his scruples about deceiving parents and encouraged the boy as much as he could.

“But I hope your manipulation of the plastic Cyril isn’t going to turn you into too much of a ritualist,” he said to Mark.  “It’s splendid of course that you should have an opportunity so young of proving your ability to get round people in the right way.  But let it be the right way, old man.  At the beginning you were full of the happiness, the secret of which you burnt to impart to others.  That happiness was the revelation of the Holy Spirit dwelling in you as He dwells in all Christian souls.  I am sure that the eloquent exposition I lately overheard of the propriety of fiddle-backed chasubles and the impropriety of Gothic ones doesn’t mean that you are in any real danger of supposing chasubles to be anything more important relatively than, say, the uniform of a soldier compared with his valour and obedience and selflessness.