But for four nights of the week and for every Saturday afternoon the DeLaunay household had made itself responsible for the Waterside Mission. In Dan Tussock’s philosophy of life, success in that lifelong struggle against the unsleeping foes that dogged the footsteps of his friend Dalton and himself was bound up with three fundamental essentials, in his own words, “somethin’ to work at, somethin’ to work for, and a friend that keeps a-climbin’.” To these Paul had suggested a fourth, without which the others would prove ineffective, “a Keeper.” Paul, however, was a chap who never talked religion. His religious faith was that of a child, unspoiled by convention and untrammelled by formulæ. His reading and his talks with Dalton had helped him through a dark and terrible passage in his spiritual experience, helped him back to his faith in his Bible, a faith more intelligently based than formerly and therefore more in touch with the work-a-day problems of life. His faith in the reality, in the friendliness of God, his mother’s God, the God of his childhood days, had never been touched. He was forced to acknowledge his inability to get much out of the sermons of the young and brilliant preacher of the First Methodist Church. They were too academic for him, they left him cold and doubting. But in the preacher’s talks to the Mission folk and especially to the boys and the men Paul found something to “chaw on,” as Dan Tussock said. The preacher was more human, more real, more vitalising, more in touch with the practical things of life. Tussock’s summing up of the difference between the pulpit discourses and the Mission talks, after he had tried both and rejected the former, was accepted by Paul as satisfactory: “In church he looks like he’s earnin’ his money. In the Mission he’s after the boys.” But Dalton would have none of this. “Get out, Tussock,” he said. “Robinson is all right. He has all sorts of fools to handle. In the pulpit he deals with a lot of highbrow theorists and a lot of dyed-in-the-wool hard-shell old time Methodists, who need a jolt now and then to remind them that they are alive. In the Mission he has his coat off, fighting the devil and hell, and, as you say, he’s after the boys.” By the end of the summer the new Mission house was opened, free of debt, and splendidly equipped for its work. At the opening function, by skilful and united team play on the part of the preacher and Paul, Dalton found himself forced to occupy the chair, to the great advantage of the meeting, while Dan Tussock, to his confusion and disgust, found himself “floor manager and general push of the show,” as he afterwards declared to his friend, Miss DeLaunay, who had come to be his confidante and who had assumed a sort of maternal responsibility for the big-hearted, simple-minded, lonely man.