de his presence
and example felt from the first on all sides, unconsciously to himself,
and without the least attempt at proselytizing. The spirit of his father
was in him, and the Friend to whom his father had left him did not
neglect the trust.

After supper that night, and almost nightly for years afterwards,
Tom and Arthur, and by degrees East occasionally, and sometimes one,
sometimes another, of their friends, read a chapter of the Bible
together, and talked it over afterwards. Tom was at first utterly
astonished, and almost shocked, at the sort of way in which Arthur read
the book and talked about the men and women whose lives were there told.
The first night they happened to fall on the chapters about the famine
in Egypt, and Arthur began talking about Joseph as if he were a living
statesman--just as he might have talked about Lord Grey and the Reform
Bill, only that they were much more living realities to him. The book
was to him, Tom saw, the most vivid and delightful history of real
people, who might do right or wrong, just like any one who was walking
about in Rugby--the Doctor, or the masters, or the sixth-form boys. But
the astonishment soon passed off, the scales seemed to drop from his
eyes, and the book became at once and for ever to him the great human
and divine book, and the men and women, whom he had looked upon
as something quite different from himself, became his friends and
counsellors.

For our purposes, however, the history of one night's reading will be
sufficient, which must be told here, now we are on the subject, though
it didn't happen till a year afterwards, and long after the events
recorded in the next chapter of our story.

Arthur, Tom, and East were together one night, and read the story of
Naaman coming to Elisha to be cured of his leprosy. When the chapter was
finished, Tom shut his Bible with a slap.

"I can't stand that fellow Naaman," said he, "after what he'd seen and
felt, going back and bowing himself down in the house of Rimmon, because
his effeminate scoundrel of a master did it. I wonder Elisha took the
trouble to heal him. How he must have despised him!"

"Yes; there you go off as usual, with a shell on your head," struck
in East, who always took the opposite side to Tom, half from love of
argument, half from conviction. "How do you know he didn't think better
of it? How do you know his master was a scoundrel? His letter don't look
like it, and the book don't say so.