Almost nightly, for years, Tom and Arthur, and by degrees East occasionally, and sometimes one, sometimes another of their friends, read a chapter of the Bible together, and talked it over afterwards. Tom was at first utterly astonished, and almost shocked, at the[114] sort of way in which Arthur read the book and talked about the men and women whose lives are there told. The first night they happened to fall on the chapters about the famine in Egypt, and Arthur began talking about Joseph as if he were a living statesman; just as he might have talked about Lord Grey and the Reform Bill; only that they were much more living realities to him. The book was to him, Tom saw, the most vivid and delightful history of real people, who might do right or wrong, just like any one who was walking about Rugby—the doctor, or the masters, or the sixth-form boys. But the atmosphere soon passed off, the scales seemed to drop from his eyes, and the book became at once and forever to him the great human and divine book, and the men and women, whom he had looked upon as something quite different from himself, became his friends and counsellors.

Arthur, Tom, and East were together one night, and read the story of Naaman coming to Elisha to be cured of his leprosy. When the chapter was finished, Tom shut his Bible with a slap.

“I can’t stand that fellow Naaman,” said he, “after what he’d seen and felt, going back again and bowing himself down in the house of Rimmon, because his effeminate scoundrel of a master did it. I wonder Elisha took the trouble to heal him. How he must have despised him.”

“Yes, there you go off as usual, with a shell on your[115] head,” struck in East, who always took the opposite side to Tom: half from love of argument, half from conviction. “How do you know he didn’t think better of it? how do you know his master was a scoundrel? His letter don’t look like it, and the book don’t say so.”

“I don’t care,” rejoined Tom; “why did Naaman talk about bowing down, then, if he didn’t mean to do it? He wasn’t likely to get more in earnest when he got back to Court, and away from the Prophet.”

“Well, but, Tom,” said Arthur, “look what Elisha says to him, ‘Go in peace.’ He wouldn’t have said that if Naaman had been in the wrong.”

“I don’t see that that means more than saying, ‘You’re not the man I took you for.’”

“No, no, that won’t do at all,” said East; “read the words fairly, and take men as you find them. I like Naaman, and think he was a very fine fellow.”

“I don’t,” said Tom, positively.

“Well, I think East is right,” said Arthur; “I can’t see but what it’s right to do the best you can, though it mayn’t be the best absolutely. Every man isn’t born to be a martyr.&............