When the offertory anthem was sung, he rose up, and advanced to the altar.  A salver of gold coins was presented to him, which he took and solemnly laid on the altar, but paused for a moment, and removed his crown with both hands, placing it likewise on the altar, and kneeling for a moment ere he turned to take the vase whence breathed the fragrant odour of frankincense; and presenting this, and afterwards kneeling and bowing low with clasped hands, he again took the salver in which the myrrh was laid.  This again he placed on the altar, and remained kneeling in intense devotion through the remainder of the service, only looking up at the ‘Sursum Corda,’ when those near enough to see his countenance said that they never knew before the full import of those words, nor how the heart could be uplifted.

It was the first time that Hal Clifford had ever joined in the full ceremonial of the Church, or in such splendid accompaniment, for though there had been the rightful ritual at St. Peter’s in the Tower, the space had been confined, and the clergy few, and the whole, even on Christmas Day, had been more or less a training to him to enter into what he now saw and heard.  He had in these last weeks gathered much of the meaning of all this from the King, who perhaps never fully disentangled the full-grown youth from the boy he had taught at Derwentdale, but who, perhaps for that very cause, really suited better the strange mixture of ignorance, simplicity, observation and aspiration of the shepherd lord.

The King did not help more but less than he had done before in Hal’s researches and wonderings about natural objects; he had forgotten the philosophies he had once read, and the supposed circuits of moon, planets and stars only perplexed and worried his brain.  It was much more satisfactory to refer all to ’He hath made them fast for ever and ever, He hath given them a law which shall not be broken,’ and he could not understand Hal’s desire to find out what that law was, and far less his calculations about the tides.  He had scarcely ever seen the sea, and as to its motions, ’Hitherto shalt thou come and no farther’ was sufficient explanation, and when Hal tried to show him the correspondence between spring tides and full moons he either waved him away or fell asleep.

But on the spiritual side of his mind there was no torpor.  He loved to explain the sense of the prayers to his willing pupil, and to tell him the Gospel story, dwelling on whatever could waken or carry on the Christian life; and between the tiltyard and the oratory Hal spent a strange life.