"They are always coming to me," Father Ripon had said on one occasion, "and complaining that they find such a tremendous difficulty in leading a holy life--say that the worldly surroundings and so forth kill their good impulses--and yet they _won't_ come to church. People are such fools! My young men imagine that they can become good Christians by a sort of sudden magic--a low beast on Saturday night, the twentieth of August, and, after a nerve storm in church and a few tears in the vestry, a saint for evermore! And then when they get drunk or do something beastly the next week, they rail against the Christian Faith because it isn't a sort of spiritual hand cuffs! And yet if you told them you could manage a bank after merely experience in a shipping office, they would see the absurdity of that at once. Donkeys!" This with a genial smile of tenderness and compassion, for this Whirlwind in a Cassock loved his flock. So from the very first Basil had found his life congenial. Privately he blessed his good fortune in living in Lincoln's Inn with Spence. On the nights when the journalist was free from the office, and not otherwise engaged, the two men sat late with pipes and coffee, enjoying that vigorous communion of two keen, young, and virile brains which is one of the truly stimulating pleasures of life. Gortre admired Spence greatly for some of his qualities. His intellect was, of course, first class--his high position on the great daily paper guaranteed that. His reading and sympathies were wide. Moreover, the clergyman found a great refreshment in the fact that, in an age of indifference, at a time when the best intellects of younger London life were professedly agnostic, Harold Spence was an avowed Christian and Churchman. As Gortre got to know him better, when the silence and detachment of midnight in the old Inn broke down reticence, he realised with a sense of thankfulness, and sometimes of fear also, how a thorough belief in religion kept the writer straight and captain of his own soul. For the man was a creature of strong passions and wayward desires. He had not always been the clean gentleman of the present. As is so often the case with a refined and cultured temperament, he had a dark and ugly side to his nature. The coarse vices of the blood called to him long and often with their hollow siren voices. Evil came to him with swift invitation and cunning allurement. He had hinted to Basil of days of sin and secret shame. And now, very soberly and without any emotion, he clung to Christ for help. And he had conquered.