They, he and his father, drove in a cab to the Chapel. Of what followed then he was now less aware. He remembered that he was in a small room with two men, that they all took off their clothes (he remembered that one man, very stout and red, looked funny without his clothes), that they put on long white night-shirts, that his was too long for him and that he tripped over it, that they all three walked down the centre of the Chapel, which was filled with eyes, mouths and boots, and that he was very conscious of his toe-nails, which had never been exposed in public before, that they came to a round stone place filled with water and into this after the two men he was dipped, that he didn't scream from the coldness, of the water although he wanted to, that he was wrapped in a blanket and finally carried home in an ecstasy of triumph. What happiness followed! The vitality of it swept down upon him now, so that he seemed never to have lived since then. He was the chosen of God and every one knew it. What a little prig and yet how simple it had all been, without any consciousness of insincerity or acting on his part. God had chosen him and there he was, for ever and ever safe and happy. It was not only that he was assured that when the moment arrived he would have, in Heaven, a "good time"--it was that he was greatly exalted, so that he gave his twopence a week pocket-money to his school-fellows, never pulled Amy's hair, never teased his mother's canary. He had been aware, young though he was, of another life. He prayed and prayed, he went to an endless succession of services and meetings. There was Mr. Bates, one of the leading brethren then, who loved him and spoilt him ... above all, through and beyond it all, there was his father, who adored him and whom he adored. That adoration--of God, of his father, of life itself! Was it possible that a small boy, normal and ordinary enough in other ways, could feel so intensely such passions? The dark room was crowding him with figures and scenes. A whole world that he had thought dead and withered was beating--urgently, insistently, upon his consciousness. In another instant he did not know what surrender, what acknowledgement he might have made. It seemed to him that nothing in life was worth while save to receive again, in some fashion, that vitality that he had once known. The door was flung open; a stream of light struck the dark; the shadows, memories, fled, helter-skelter, like crackling smoke into the air. Amy stood in the doorway, blinking at him, scowling. He knew, for some undefined reason, that he could not meet his father's eyes. He jumped up and walked to the window. CHAPTER II EXPECTATION Maggie developed marvellously during her first weeks in London. It could not truthfully be said that her aunts gave her great opportunity for development; so far as they were concerned she might as well have been back in the green seclusion of St. Dreots.