So I let him gaze into the fire in peace, and all Saturday he was at the potteries or at the office, very busy about all his plans and also taking in hand the charge for George Yolland, for both brothers were going on Monday to take a fortnight’s holiday among their relations.  He only came in to dinner, and after it told me very kindly that he must leave me alone again, for he wanted to see Ben Yolland.  A good person for him to wish to see, “but was all this restlessness?” thought this foolish Lucy.

When he came in, only just at bed-time, there was something more of rest, and less of weary sadness about his eyes than I had seen since the troubles began, and as we wished one another good night he said, “Lucy, God forgives while He punishes.  He is better to us than man.  Yolland says I may be with you at church early to-morrow.”

Then my cheeks flushed hot with joy, and I said how thankful I was that all this had not distracted his thoughts from the subject.  “When I wanted help more than ever?” he said.

So in some ways that was to me at least a gladsome Sunday, though not half so much at the time as it has become in remembrance, and I could not guess how much of conscious peace or joy Harold felt, as, for the first and only time, he and I knelt together on the chancel step.

He said nothing, but he had quite recovered his usual countenance and manner, only looking more kind and majestic than ever, as I, his fond aunt, thought, when we went among the children after the school service, to give them the little dainties they had missed in his absence; and he smiled when they came round him with their odd little bits of chatter.

We sat over the fire in the evening, and talked a little of surface things, but that died away, and after a quarter of an hour or so, he looked up at me and said, “And what next?”

“What are we to do, do you mean?” I said, for I had been thinking how all his schemes of life had given way.  We spoke of it together.  “Old Eu did not want him,” as he said, and though there was much for him to do at the Hydriot works and the Mission Chapel, the Reading Room, the Association for Savings, and all the rest which needed his eye, yet for Viola’s peace he thought he ought not to stay, and the same cause hindered the schemes he had once shared with Dermot; he had cut himself loose from Australia, and there seemed nothing before him.  “There were the City Missions,” he said, wearily, for he did not love the City, and yet he felt more than ever the force of his dying father’s commission to carry out his longings for the true good of the people.

I said we could make a London home and see Dora sometimes, trying to make him understand that he might reckon on me as his sister friend, but the answer was, “I don’t count on that.”

“You don’t want to cast me off?”

“No, indeed, but there is another to be thought of.”