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."

We went down to breakfast, where Eustace appeared in full hunting trim,
but Harold in the rough coat and long gaiters that meant farming work;
and to Eustace's invitations to the run, he replied by saying he heard
that Phil Ogden had been to ask him about some difficulty in the
trenching work, and he was going to see to it. So he spent the
daylight hours in one of those digging and toiling tasks of his "that
three day-labourers could not end." I saw him coming home at six
o'clock, clay up to the eyes, and having achieved wholesome hunger and
wholesome sleepiness.

Eustace had come in cross. He had been chaffed about Harold's
shirking, and being a dutiful nephew, and he did not like it at all. He
thought Harold