“My dear young lady,” he said to me, when I tried to persuade him out of writing the first letter, “you forget how much I have of sin upon me.  Can years of negation of faith, or the ruin of four young lives, and I know not of how many more, be repented of at ease in your pleasant town, amid the amiable cares you young people are good enough to lavish on the old man?”

I made some foolish answer about his having meant all for good and noble purposes, but he shook his head.

“Error, my dear madam, error excusable, perhaps, in one whose country has been destroyed.  I see, now that I have returned, after years alone with my God, that the work I tried to precipitate was one of patience.  The fire from heaven must first illuminate the soul, then the spirit, and then the bonds will be loosed of themselves; otherwise we do but pluck them asunder to set maniacs free to rush into the gulf.  And as to my influence on my two pupils, your brothers, I see now that what began in filial rebellion and disobedience could never end well.  I bless God that I have been permitted to see, in the next generation, the true hero and reformer I ought to have made of my Ambrose.  Ah!  Ambrose, Ambrose! noble young spirit, would that any tears and penance of mine would expiate the shipwreck to which I led thee!” and he burst into tears.

He had, of course, seen the Roman Catholic priest several times before encountering the danger of the operation, and was a thoroughly devout penitent, but of his old Liberalism he retained the intense benevolence that made the improvements at the potteries a great delight to him, likewise the historical breadth of understanding that prevented his thinking us all un-Catholic and unsafe.

It was a great blessing that Harold was not held back but rather aided and stimulated by the example of the man to whom he most looked up; but with his characteristic silence, it was long before I found that, having felt, beside his mother’s death-bed, how far his spiritual wants had outgrown me, he had carried them to Ben Yolland, though the old morning habit remained unbroken, and he always came to the little room I had made like my old one.

Ben Yolland had become more entirely chaplain to the Hydriots.  Those two brothers lived together in a curious way at what we all still called the “Dragon’s Head,” each with his own sitting-room and one in common, one fitted as a clergyman’s study, the other more like a surgery; for though George had given up his public practice since he had been manager of the works, he still attended all the workpeople and their families, only making them pay for their medicines “when it was good for them.”