heart throbbed when, as a youth, he had been
admitted for the first time to this most sacred of all Christian
privileges! He was instructed in its deep and glorious symbolism, and
had often felt the purifying, saving, and refreshing effect of the
sacrament, strengthening him in all goodness, when he had partaken of it
with his parents and brothers. Hand-in-hand, they had gone home feeling
as if newly robed in body and soul and more closely bound together than
before. And to-day, insensible as he was to the repulsiveness of the
forms of worship of his confession he felt as though the bread and
wine--the Flesh and Blood of the Saviour--had sealed the bond he had
silently entered into with himself; as though the Lord had put forth
an invisible hand to remove the guilt and the curse that crushed him
so sorely. Deep devotion fell on his soul: his future life, he thought,
should bring him nearer to God than ever before, and be spent in loving,
and in the more earnest, full, and laborious exercise of the gifts
Heaven had bestowed on him.

CHAPTER III.

Orion had dreaded the drive home with his mother, but after complaining
to him of Susannah's conduct in having made a startling display of her
vexation in the women's place behind the screen, she had leaned on him
and fallen fast asleep. Her head was on her son's shoulder when they
reached home, and Orion's anxiety for the mother he truly loved was
enhanced when he found it difficult to rouse her. He felt her stagger
like a drunken creature, and he led her not into the fountain-room but
to her bed-chamber, where she only begged to lie down; and hardly had
she done so when she was again overcome by sleep.

Orion now made his way to Gamaliel the jeweller, to purchase from him a
very large and costly diamond, plainly set, and the Israelite's brother
undertook to deliver it to the fair widow at Constantinople, who
was known to him as one of his customers. Orion, in the jeweller's
sitting-room, wrote a letter to his former mistress, in which he begged
her in the most urgent manner to accept the diamond, and in exchange
to return to him the emerald by a swift and trustworthy messenger, whom
Simeon the goldsmith would provide with everything needful.

After all this he went home hungry and weary, to the late midday meal
which he shared, as for many days past, with no one but Eudoxia, Mary's
governess. The little girl was not yet allowed to leave her room, and of
this, for one