That something had perturbed him was instantly apparent both to my mother and myself, not only on account of the sudden tremor that became visible in his left hand but of the extraordinary rapidity with which he read the appointed chapter, and the verbal errors that consequently ensued. His subsequent prayer too was so brief that we were scarcely upon our knees before he had leapt to his feet again, and my mother and myself, indeed, were still kneeling when he began to expound the idea that had been vouchsafed to him. “I have it,” he cried. “It’s just been sent to me. Chrysostom Lorton. That’s the man. Eighteen editions—that’s what his Bible’s gone into, and none of the authors with any royalty rights!” Nor was that all, for in addition, as I have said, to being the elder brother of Mr. Septimus Lorton, he was not only the proprietor of the well-known _Beulah_, perhaps the most popular of weekly religious journals, but his _Peeping Up Series for Children_, devotional stories with coloured illustrations, were familiar objects upon the nursery book-shelves of every evangelical household. Moreover he was the medium through which were issued to the world many millions of hortatory pamphlets, while the counters of his show-room in Paternoster Row were heaped with every kind of Protestant literature. Such then was the man and such the undertaking, not only Xtian but lucrative, that by a chance gesture, or so it might have seemed, now stood beckoning before us; and it was only necessary, as my father justly said, for his brother Septimus to do the rest. But would he? I was at first doubtful. A weak man, he was also inert. And it did not of course follow that because he used his brother’s Bible he was on intimate or influential terms with him. This much was clear, however, that as the oldest pupil in his school, and in view of the treatment that I had received from his subordinates, he was under an obligation to me that neither my father nor myself could morally allow ourselves to remit. And although for reasons that I have already mentioned I had not advanced from my original class, in the strictly ethical sense, by his own admission, I was _facile princeps_.[4] Footnote 4: Easily first. “A good boy,” said Mr. Lorton, “a very, very good boy, or shall we say, now that he has begun to shave, an extremely admirable young man.” This was upon the next evening, the penultimate evening of my last term at school, when both my father and myself were sitting in Mr. Lorton’s study for the purpose indicated above.