The two Stanhopes had gone back with the Weatherleys, on the return of the clergyman and his wife to their country parish, and had found lodgings close to the vicarage where Mrs. Weatherley still had the baby in her kind care. It was the attraction of the baby—with the fear of doing it harm by removing it from the good offices of an experienced matron—which in the beginning drew Harry and his brother across the Channel, back to England, and down into the rural retirement of a remote parish. But it soon became plain that the Weatherleys—coming in contact with Harry Stanhope at a turning point in his life, getting him into their hands when his heart was wrung with suffering and his whole character subdued—had acquired a growing influence over the young man. He was rapidly adopting their forms of thought and turns of speech, and falling in, to some extent, with their habits and practices. He had always possessed in a sense a ductile disposition, apt to take the moulding of its surroundings and associations. But a great wrench had been required to separate a thoughtless young fellow from his low atmosphere—laden with earthly vapours and dense with worldliness, and to launch him into the higher, rarer air of altogether loftier principles and considerations, breathed by the Weatherleys. Harry had suffered such a wrench and received such an impetus as propels many men—especially many shallow, impulsive men—to the opposite poles of their former opinions and pursuits. At this epoch of his history—when Harry Stanhope turned inevitably, with a sick heart, from his old interests; when all his former sports, though he still engaged in them mechanically, were flat and stale to him; when what was spiritual in his moral constitution craved spiritual consolation and refreshment—something beyond this world, some promise of reward and restoration for his lost love and its object, some reparation of all wrong, and enduring foundation for all good—Harry was carried out of the past in a totally new direction from any he had followed hitherto, where his brother would join him sooner or later. Harry retained his simple cordiality, but the simplicity had got a new bias, and the cordiality a fresh outlet. In those letters—the occasional writing of which, without the inducement of borrowing money, was a marvel in itself—while he expressed himself scantily, there was also something of the transparent prattle though not the gush of a girl. In the more recent prattle Oliver learnt a good deal of church services and parish work, in which, to his wonder at first, he found Harry was taking part. He had been practising with Mr. Weatherley’s choir, and doing a little rudimentary teaching in his schools, as well as helping Mrs. Weatherley with her parish children’s annual feast and the machinery of her different clubs.