ed the idea of converting Esther Ogilvie.
He fell back on wishing again that Mr. Spaull had not died; in him he
really would have had an ideal subject.

In the end Mark fixed upon a boy of his own age, one of the many sons of
a Papuan missionary called Pomeroy who was glad to have found in Mr.
Lidderdale a cheap and evangelical schoolmaster. Cyril Pomeroy was a
blushful, girlish youth, clever at the routine of school work, but in
other ways so much undeveloped as to give an impression of stupidity.
The notion of pointing out to him the beauty and utility of the Catholic
religion would probably never have occurred to Mark if the boy himself
had not approached him with a direct complaint of the dreariness of home
life. Mark had never had any intimate friends at Haverton House; there
was something in its atmosphere that was hostile to intimacy. Cyril
Pomeroy appealed to that idea of romantic protection which is the common
appendage of adolescence, and is the cause of half the extravagant
affection at which maturity is wont to laugh. In the company of Cyril,
Mark felt ineffably old than which upon the threshold of sixteen there
is no sensation more grateful; and while the intercourse flattered his
own sense of superiority he did feel that he had much to offer his
friend. Mark regarded Cyril's case as curable if the right treatment
were followed, and every evening after school during the veiled summer
of a fine October he paced the Slowbridge streets with his willing
proselyte, debating the gravest issues of religious practice, the
subtlest varieties of theological opinion. He also lent Cyril suitable
books, and finally he demanded from him as a double tribute to piety and
friendship that he should prove his metal by going to Confession.
Cyril, who was incapable of refusing whatever Mark demanded, bicycled
timorously behind him to Meade Cantorum one Saturday afternoon, where he
gulped out the table of his sins to Mr. Ogilvie, whom Mark had fetched
from the Vicarage with the urgency of one who fetches a midwife. Nor was
he at all abashed when Mr. Ogilvie was angry for not having been told
that Cyril's father would have disapproved of his son's confession. He
argued that the priest was applying social standards to religious
principles, and in the end he enjoyed the triumph of hearing Mr. Ogilvie
admit that perhaps he was right.

"I know I'm right. Come on, Cyril. You'd better get back home now. Oh,
and I say, Mr. Ogilvie, can