Harry took his hat and made his best bow. He was really quite tremulous with excitement, surprise, and pleasure. To be so speedily and so easily established was more good fortune than he could realize. When he was at the door Mr. Bonamy called him back. “Oliver!” he cried, “one moment; I would not knock any more men down if I were you; however quietly it is done, it is a little risky, and Her Majesty’s Service, you know----” “You needn’t fear, Sir; that’s what Paul-o has been preaching to me all the time,” Harry said. Upon which the Vice-Consul laughed benignly. “Paul-o, as you call him, is as good an adviser as you could have,” he said. “What should I call him but Paul-o?” Harry said to himself; and he went off with his head in the air. Lucky! indeed he had been lucky; only the third day since his arrival and he had a situation and a sort of a home and friends; to make up to him for all the evil that had happened to him before, providence was taking special care of him now. Somehow this made Harry think of his mother, of whom, hitherto, his thoughts had been scarcely more kind than towards the others concerned; a little moisture crept unawares to his eyes. “She’ll have been praying,” he said to himself; and suddenly he seemed to see her, as he had seen her so often, wringing her thin worn hands, her lips trembling with words that were inaudible. He thought--it would be hard to trace the exact connection of ideas, but there was one--that he would go in to the first church in which there seemed to be service going on, on his way back to the inn. It would not have occurred to him to go into a church where there was no service, but when he heard the tinkle of a bell, and saw one or two people creeping up and down the broad stone steps, he went in, though with a little opposition in his mind, as well as a certain craving for sympathy and utterance. But when he went in, Harry saw no signs of public worship. The tinkle of the bell was coming from an altar in a side chapel, where a great many candles were burning. In the body of the church some people were seated quietly, others kneeling on the low rush-bottomed chairs. He stood and gazed for a little with mingled feelings, with a great opposition in his mind to the Papist ritual and ceremonies (of which he saw nothing, and which, to tell the truth, he had never seen, and knew nothing whatever about); and disapproval of the people who were in the church for, as he thought, no purpose--mingled with a curious sense of the grateful calm and quietness and seclusion of the place, the serene coolness and breadth of its lofty roofs and silent space. This stole upon him, he could not tell how. He would not have knelt down, as the few people about were doing, to save his life: it would have seemed to him like the famous bowing down in the house of Rimmon, for the North was very Protestant in those days, and sympathy with Rome was very rare. He would not even say a distinct prayer in his