“Oh, can’t you see,” he cried, “that we’re standing on Pisgah?” For a moment, not comprehending him, she stared at his feet. Then very softly she withdrew, and he came toward me with outstretched hands. “A Xtian magnate,” he said, “a commercial Xtian—what better could I have desired for you?” Impulsively I kissed him, perhaps a little too impulsively. But he scarcely flinched as he received the impact, merely remarking that, upon the next day, he would present me with my first razor. Nor did he fail to do so, partly reminded by myself, and partly by the appearance, early the next morning, of a slight but painful urticaria or nettlerash in the region of our most vehement facial adjustment. But that was a penalty, as he several times assured me, that many a father would have been glad to pay, and one that yielded, in less than a fortnight, to an inunction embracing the oxide of zinc. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER VII A further vision is vouchsafed to us by Providence. Mr. Chrysostom Lorton and the sources of his wealth. The debt owed to me by Mr. Septimus Lorton. Interview with Mr. and Mrs. Septimus Lorton. Mr. Septimus Lorton’s disgraceful attitude. My father is compelled to be frank with him. What I discovered in Greenwich Park. MANIFESTLY as it had been Providence that had thus revealed to us the general sphere of my future activities, it was no less clearly the same beneficent Agency that determined their actual channel; and it has always seemed to me peculiarly appropriate that the particular enterprise with which I was to be first connected should have been suggested to my father during the process of family prayers. This took place, according to our usual custom, immediately after the conclusion of our evening meal and consisted of the singing by my father and myself of two or three hymns or sacred choruses, followed by the reading on the part of my father of a chapter of Holy Scripture, the whole being concluded by one of those extemporary prayers in the composition of which my father was so skilled. For the purposes of the Scripture reading the volume generally used was a large Bible inherited by my father, but on the evening in question, owing to an accident with some stewed fruit, this was absent at a neighbouring bookbinder’s. My father had therefore borrowed with my glad permission my copy of the Lorton Bible for Schools, and it was in opening this that he caught sight of the words “eighteenth edition” on the first page.