He did not set me down till we were at the front door.  We were both wet through, cold, and spent, and it was past nine, so long as it had taken him to labour on in the tempest.  Eustace came out grumbling in his petulant way at our absence from dinner.  I don’t think either of us could bear it just then:  Harold went up to his room without a word; I stayed to tell that he had seen me home from church, and say a little about the fearful weather, and then ran up myself, to give orders, as Mr. Yolland had advised me, that some strong hot coffee should be taken at once to Harold’s room.

I thought it would be besetting him to go and see after him myself, but I let Dora knock at his door, and heard he had gone to bed.  To me it was a long night of tossing and half-sleep, hearing the wild stormy wind, and dreaming of strange things, praying all the time that the noble soul might be won for God at last, and almost feeling, like the Icelander during the conversion of his country, the struggle between the dark spirits and the white.

I had caught a heavy cold, and should have stayed in bed had I not been far too anxious; and I am glad I did not, for I had not been many minutes in my sitting-room before there was a knock at the door, and Harold came in, and what he said was, “Lucy, how does one pray ?”

Poor boys!  Their mothers, in the revulsion from all that had seemed like a system of bondage, had held lightly by their faith, and in the cares and troubles of their life had heeded little of their children’s devotions, so that the practical heathenism of their home at Boola Boola had been unrelieved save by Eustace the elder, when his piety was reckoned as part of his weak, gentlemanly refinement.  The dull hopeless wretchedness was no longer in Harold’s face, but there was a wistful, gentle weariness, and yet rest in it, which was very touching, as he came to me with his strange sad question, “How does one pray?”

I don’t know exactly how I answered it.  I hardly could speak for crying, as I told him the very same things one tells the little children, and tried to find him some book to help; but my books no more suited him than my clothes would have done, till he said, “I want what they said in church yesterday.”

And as we knelt together, and I said it, the 51st Psalm came to my mind, and I went through it, oh! how differently from when I had said it the day before.  “Ah!” he said at the end, “thank you.”

And then he stood and looked at the picture which was as his child’s to him, turned and said, “Well for him that he is out of all this!”

Presently, when I had marked a Prayer Book for him, he said, “And may I ask that the—­the craving I told you of may not come on so intolerably?”

“‘Ask, and it shall be given,’” I said.  “It may not go at once, dear Harold.  Temptation does come, but only to be conquered; and you will conquer now.”