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 midshipmen; and on Sundays he gave himself with a precocious devoutness to church and Sabbath school. He had been impressed with the teaching that the Deity is omnipresent; and in his solitary moments he was almost physically conscious of the awful presence of the Spirit. It was a feeling which he kept as secret as a sin; but it came to possess him with a sense of companionship. He even played with it imaginatively, half expecting visions and praying in a childish ecstasy; and in the public Park near his home, there was a thick clump of bushes in which he used to build little fires of chips and leaves to burn wooden animals from his ark as Hebraic offerings.

Among the pupils of Miss Morris's school was Don's elder cousin Conroy—the boy whose face Miss Margaret had not liked; and between Don and him there had always been a boyish ill-will that grew into a noticeable enmity as Don became more of a long-legged weakling and Conroy more of a pug-nosed and sturdy bully. The tie of their relationship, added to Don's plain inferiority in physical strength, kept them from any set fights, but Conroy played rough tricks on his cousin, tripped him slyly in the class-room, shouldered him from the sidewalk into the gutter, filled his cap with snow, and laughingly pelted and persecuted him in the playground and on the street. At the same time, he would not let anyone else take the same liberties; and he fought more than one of the boys who—in the expressive idiom of the schoolyard—"picked on" Don. Conroy plodded through his studies as slowly as Don sauntered; and