The Williamses had come over the second evening following Lorne's arrival, after tea. Rawlins had gone to the station, just to see that the Express would make no mistake in announcing that Mr L. Murchison had "Returned to the Paternal Roof," and the Express had announced it, with due congratulation. Family feeling demanded that for the first twenty-four hours he should be left to his immediate circle, but people had been dropping in all the next day at the office, and now came the Williamses "trapesing," as Mrs Murchison said, across the grass, though she was too content to make it more than a private grievance, to where they all sat on the verandah.

"What I don't understand," Horace Williams said to Mr Murchison, "was why you didn't give him a blow on the whistle. You and Milburn and a few others might have got up quite a toot. You don't get the secretary to a deputation for tying up the Empire home every day."

"You did that for him in the Express," said John Murchison, smiling as he pressed down, with an accustomed thumb, the tobacco into his pipe.

"Oh, we said nothing at all! Wait till he's returned for South Fox," Williams responded jocularly.

"Why not the Imperial Council—of the future—at Westminster while you're about it?" remarked Lorne, flipping a pebble back upon the gravel path.

"That will keep, my son. But one of these days, you mark my words, Mr L. Murchison will travel to Elgin Station with flags on his engine and he'll be very much surprised to find the band there, and a large number of his fellow-citizens, all able-bodied shouting men, and every factory whistle in Elgin let off at once, to say nothing of kids with tin ones. And if the Murchison Stove and Furnace Works siren stands out of that occasion I'll break in and pull it myself."

"It won't stand out," Stella assured him. "I'll attend to it. Don't you worry."

"I suppose you had a lovely time, Mr Murchison?" said Mrs Williams, gently tilting to and fro in a rocking-chair, with her pretty feet in their American shoes well in evidence. It is a fact, or perhaps a parable, that should be interesting to political economists, the adaptability of Canadian feet to American shoes; but fortunately it is not our present business. Though I must add that the "rocker" was also American; and the hammock in which Stella reposed came from New York; and upon John Murchison's knee, with the local journal, lay a pink evening paper published in Buffalo.

"Better than I can tell you, Mrs Williams, in all sorts of ways. But it's good to be back, too. Very good!" Lorne threw up his head and drew in the pleasant evening air of midsummer with infinite relish while his eye travelled contentedly past the chestnuts on the lawn, down the vista of the quiet tree-bordered street. It lay empty in the solace of the evening, a blue hill crossed it in the distance, and gave it an unfettered look, the wind stirred in the maples. A pair of schoolgirls strolled up and down bareheaded; now and then a buggy passed.

"There's room here," he said.

"Find it kind of crowded up over there?" asked Mr Williams. "Worse than New York?"

"Oh, yes. Crowded in a patient sort of way—it's enough to break your heart—that you don't see in New York! The poor of New York—well, they've got the idea of not being poor. In England they're resigned, they've got callous. My goodness! the fellows out of work over there—you can SEE they're used to it, see it in the way they slope along and the look in their eyes, poor dumb dogs. They don't understand it, but they've just got to take it! Crowded? Rather!"

"We don't say 'rather' in this country, mister," observed Stella.

"Well, you can say it now, kiddie."

They laughed at the little passage—the traveller's importation of one or two Britishisms had been the subject of skirmish before—but silence fell among them for a moment afterward. They all had in the blood the remembrance of what Lorne had seen.

"Well, you've been doing big business," said Horace Williams.

Lorne shook his head. "We haven't done any harm," he said, "but our scheme's away out of sight now. At least it ought to be."

"Lost in the bigger issue." said Williams, and Lorne nodded.

The bigger issue had indeed in the meantime obscured the political horizon, and was widely spreading. A mere colonial project might well disappear in it. England was absorbed in a single contemplation. Wallingham, though he still supported the disabilities of a right honourable evangelist with a gospel of his own, was making astonishing conversions; the edifice of the national economic creed seemed coming over at the top. It was a question of the resistance of the base, and the world was watching.

"Cruickshank says if the main question had been sprung a month ago we wouldn't have gone over. As it is, on several points we've got to wait. If they reject the preferential trade idea over there we shall have done a little good, for any government would be disposed to try to patch up something to take the place of imperial union in that case; and a few thousands more for shipping subsidies and cheap cablegrams would have a great look of strengthening the ties with the colonies. But if they commit themselves to a zollverein with us and the rest of the family you won't hear much more about the need to foster communications. Communications will foster themselves."

"Just so," remarked John Murchison. "They'll save their money."

"I wouldn't think so before—I couldn't," Lorne went on, "but I'm afraid it's rather futile, the kind of thing we've been trying to do. It's fiddling at a superstructure without a foundation. What we want is the common interest. Common interest, common taxation for defence, common representation, domestic management of domestic affairs, and you've got a working Empire."

"Just as easy as slippin' off a log," remarked Horace Williams.

"Common interest, yes," said his father; "common taxation, no, for defence or any other purpose. The colonies will never send money to be squandered by the London War Office. We'll defend ourselves, as soon as we can manage it, and buy our own guns and our own cruisers. We're better business people than they are, and we know it."

"I guess that's right, Mr Murchison," said Horace Williams. "Our own army and navy—in the sweet bye-and-bye. And let 'em understand they'll be welcome to the use of it, but quite in a family way—no sort of compulsion."

"Well," said Lorne, "that's compatible enough."

"And your domestic affairs must include the tariff," Mr Murchison went on. "There's no such possibility as a tariff that will go round. And tariffs are kittle cattle to shoo behind."

"Has anybody got a Scotch dictionary?" inquired Stella. "This conversation is making me tired."

"Suppose you run away and play with your hoop," suggested her brother. "I can't see that as an insuperable difficulty, Father. Tariffs could be made adaptable, relative to the common interest as well as to the individual one. We could do it if we liked."

"Your adaptability might easily lead to other things. What's to prevent retaliation among ourselves? There's a slump in textiles, and the home Government is forced to let in foreign wool cheaper. Up goes the Australian tax on the output of every mill in Lancashire. The last state of the Empire might be worse than the first."

"It wouldn't be serious. If I pinched Stella's leg as I'm going to in a minute, she will no doubt kick me; and her instincts are such that she will probably kick me with the leg I pinched, but that won't prevent our going to the football match together tomorrow and presenting a united front to the world."

They all laughed, and Stella pulled down her lengthening petticoats with an air of great offence, but John Murchison shook his head.

"If they manage it, they will be clever," he said.

"Talking of Lancashire," said Williams, "there are some funny fellows over there writing in the Press against a tax on foreign cotton because it's going to ruin Lancashire. And at this very minute thousands of looms are shut down in Lancashire because of the high price of cotton produced by an American combine—and worse coming, sevenpence a pound I hear they're going to have it, against the fourpence ha'penny they've got it up to already. That's the sort of thing they're afraid to discourage by a duty."

"Would a duty discourage it?" asked John Murchison.

"Why not—if they let British-grown cotton in free? They won't discourage the combine much—that form of enterprise has got to be tackled where it grows; but the Yankee isn't the only person in the world that can get to understand it. What's to prevent preferential conditions creating British combines, to compete with the American article, and what's to prevent Lancashire getting cheaper cotton in consequence? Two combines are better than one monopoly any day."

"May be so. It would want looking into. We won't see a duty on cotton though, or wool either for that matter. The manufacturers would be pleased enough to get it on the stuff they make, but there would be a fine outcry against taxing the stuff they use."

"Did you see much of the aristocracy, Mr Murchison?" asked Mrs Williams.

"No," replied Lorne, "but I saw Wallingham."

"You saw the whole House of Lords," interposed Stella, "and you were introduced to three."

"Well, yes, that's so. Fine-looking set of old chaps they are, too. We're a little too funny over here about the Lords—we haven't had to make any."

"What were they doing the day you were there, Lorne?" asked Williams.

"Motorcar legislation," replied Lorne. "Considerably excited about it, too. One of them had had three dogs killed on his estate. I saw his letter about it in the Times."

"I don't see anything to laugh at in that," declared Stella. "Dogs are dogs."

"They are, sister, especially in England."

"Laundresses aren't washerwomen there," observed Mrs Murchison. "I'd like you to see the colour of the things he's brought home with him, Mrs Williams. Clean or dirty, to the laundry they go—weeks it will take to get them right again—ingrained London smut and nothing else."

"In this preference business they've got to lead the way," Williams reverted. "We're not so grown up but what grandma's got to march in front. Now, from your exhaustive observation of Great Britain, extending over a period of six weeks, is she going to?"

"My exhaustive observation," said Lorne, smiling, "enables me to tell you one thing with absolute accuracy; and that is that nobody knows. They adore Wallingham over there—he's pretty nearly a god—and they'd like to do as he tells them, and they're dead sick of theoretic politics; but they're afraid—oh, they're afraid!"

"They'll do well to ca' canny," said John Murchison.

"There's two things in the way, at a glance," Lorne went on. "The conservatism of the people—it isn't a name, it's a fact—the hostility and suspicion; natural enough: they know they're stupid, and they half suspect they're fair game. I suppose the Americans have taught them that. Slow—oh, slow! More interested in the back-garden fence than anything else. Pick up a paper, at the moment when things are being done, mind, all over the world, done against them—when their shipping is being captured, and their industries destroyed, and their goods undersold beneath their very noses—and the thing they want to know is—Why Are the Swallows Late? I read it myself, in a ha'penny morning paper, too—that they think rather dangerously go-ahead—a whole column, headed, to inquire what's the matter with the swallows. The Times the same week had a useful leader on Alterations in the Church Service, and a special contribution on Prayers for the Dead. Lord, they need 'em! Those are the things they THINK about! The session's nearly over, and there's two Church Discipline Bills, and five Church Bills—bishoprics and benefices, and Lord knows what—still to get through. Lot of anxiety about 'em, apparently! As to a business view of politics, I expect the climate's against it. They'll see over a thing—they're fond of doing that—or under it, or round one side of it, but they don't seem to have any way of seeing THROUGH it. What they just love is a good round catchword; they've only got to hear themselves say it often enough, and they'll take it for gospel. They're convinced out of their own mouths. There was the driver of a bus I used to ride on pretty often, and if he felt like talking, he'd always begin, 'As I was a-saying of yesterday—' Well, that's the general idea—to repeat what they were a-sayin' of yesterday; and it doesn't matter two cents that the rest of the world has changed the subject. They've been a-sayin' a long time that they object to import duties of any sort or kind, and you won't get them to SEE the business in changing. If they do this it won't be because they want to, it will be because Wallingham wants them to."

"I guess that's so," said Williams. "And if Wallingham gets them to he ought to have a statue in every capital in the Empire. He will, too. Good cigar this, Lorne! Where'd you get it?"

"They are Indian cheroots—'Planters,' they call 'em—made in Madras. I got some through a man named Hesketh, who has friends out there, at a price you wouldn't believe for as decent a smoke. You can't buy 'em in London; but you will all right, and here, too, as soon as we've got the sense to favour British-grown tobacco."

"Lorne appreciates his family better than he did before," remarked his youngest sister, "because we're British grown."

"You were saying you noticed two things specially in the way?" said his father.

"Oh, the other's of course the awful poverty—the twelve millions that haven't got enough to do with. I expect it's an outside figure and it covers all sorts of qualifying circumstances; but it's the one the Free Fooders quote, and it's the one Wallingham will have to handle. They've muddled along until they've GOT twelve million people in that condition, and now they have to carry on with the handicap. We ask them to put a tax on foreign food to develop our wheat areas and cattle ranges. We say, 'Give us a chance and we'll feed you and take your surplus population.' What is to be done with the twelve million while we are growing the wheat? The colonies offer to create prosperity for everybody concerned at a certain outlay—we've got the raw materials—and they can't afford the investment because of the twelve millions, and what may happen meanwhile. They can't face the meanwhile—that's what it comes to."

"Fine old crop of catchwords in that situation," Mr Williams remarked; and his eye had the spark of the practical politician. "Can't you hear 'em at it, eh?"

"It scares them out of everything but hand-to-mouth politics. Any other remedy is too heroic. They go on pointing out and contemplating and grieving, with their percentages of misery and degeneration; and they go on poulticing the cancer with benevolence—there are people over there who want the State to feed the schoolchildren! Oh, they're kind, good, big-hearted people; and they've got the idea that if they can only give enough away everything will come right. I was talking with a man one day, and I asked him whether the existence of any class justified governing a great country on the principle of an almshouse. He asked me who the almsgivers ought to be, in any country. Of course it was tampering with my figure—in an almshouse there aren't any; but that's the way it presents itself to the best of them. Another fellow was frantic at the idea of a tax on foreign food—he nearly cried—but would be very glad to see the Government do more to assist emigration to the colonies. I tried to show him it would be better to make it profitable to emigrate first, but I couldn't make him see it.

"Oh, and there's the old thing against them, of course—the handling of imperial and local affairs by one body. Anybody's good enough to attend to the Baghdad Railway, and nobody's too good to attend to the town pump. Is it any wonder the Germans beat them in their own shops and Russia walks into Thibet? The eternal marvel is that they stand where they do."

"At the top," said Mr Williams.

"Oh—at the top! Think of what you mean when you say 'England.'"

"I see that the demand for a tariff on manufactured goods is growing," Williams remarked, "even the anti-food-tax organs are beginning to shout for that."

"If they had put it on twenty years ago," said Lorne, "there would be no twelve million people making a problem for want of work, and it would be a good deal easier to do imperial business today."

"You'll find," said John Murchison, removing his pipe, "that protection'll have to come first over there. They'll put up a fence and save their trade—in their own good time, not next week or next year—and when they've done that they'll talk to us about our big ideas—not before. And if Wallingham hadn't frightened them with the imperial job, he never would have got them to take up the other. It's just his way of getting both done."

"I hope you're right, Father," said Lorne, with a covert glance at his watch. "Horace—Mrs Williams—I'll have to get you to excuse me. I have an engagement at eight."

He left them with a happy spring in his step, left them looking after him, talking of him, with pride and congratulation. Only Stella, with a severe lip and a disapproving eye, noted the direction he took as he left the house.



CHAPTER XVIII

Peter Macfarlane had carried the big Bible up the pulpit steps of Knox Church, and arranged the glass of water and the notices to be given out beside it, twice every Sunday for twenty years. He was a small spare man, with thin grey hair that fell back from the narrow dome of his forehead to his coat collar, decent and severe. He ascended the pulpit exactly three minutes before the minister did; and the dignity with which he put one foot before the other made his appearance a ceremonious feature of the service and a thing quoted. "I was there before Peter" was a triumphant evidence of punctuality. Dr Drummond would have liked to make it a test. It seemed to him no great thing to expect the people of Knox Church to be there before Peter.

Macfarlane was also in attendance in the vestry to help the minister off with his gown and hang it up. Dr Drummond's gown needed neither helping nor hanging; the Doctor was deftness and neatness and impatience itself, and would have it on the hook with his own hands, and never a fold crooked. After Mr Finlay, on the contrary, Peter would have to pick up and smooth out—ten to one the garment would be flung on a chair. Still, he was invariably standing by to see it flung, and to hand Mr Finlay his hat and stick. He was surprised and put about to find himself one Sunday evening too late for this attendance. The vestry was empty, the gown was on the floor. Peter gathered it up with as perturbed an air as if Mr Finlay had omitted a point of church observance. "I doubt they get into slack ways in these missions," said Peter. He had been unable, with Dr Drummond, to see the necessity for such extensions.

Meanwhile Hugh Finlay, in secular attire, had left the church by the vestry door, and was rapidly overtaking groups of his hearers as they walked homeward. He was unusually aware of his change of dress because of a letter in the inside pocket of his coat. The letter, in that intimate place, spread a region of consciousness round it which hastened his blood and his step. There was purpose in his whole bearing; Advena Murchison, looking back at some suggestion of Lorne's, caught it, and lost for a moment the meaning of what she said. When he overtook them, with plain intention, she walked beside the two men, withdrawn and silent, like a child. It was unexpected and overwhelming, his joining them after the service, accompanying them, as it were, in the flesh after having led them so far in the spirit; he had never done it before. She felt her heart confronted with a new, an immediate issue, and suddenly afraid. It shrank from the charge for which it longed, and would have fled; yet, paralysed with delight, it kept time with her sauntering feet.

They talked of the sermon, which had been strongly tinged with the issue of the day. Dreamer as he was by temperament, Finlay held to the wisdom of informing great public questions with the religious idea, vigorously disclaimed that it was anywhere inadmissible.

"You'll have to settle with the Doctor, Mr Finlay," Lorne warned him gaily, "if you talk politics in Knox Church. He thinks he never does."

"Do you think," said Finlay, "that he would object to—to one's going as far afield as I did tonight?"

"He oughtn't to," said Lorne. "You should have heard him when old Sir John Macdonald gerrymandered the electoral districts and gave votes to the Moneida Indians. The way he put it, the Tories in the congregation couldn't say a word, but it was a treat for his fellow Grits."

Finlay smiled gravely. "Political convictions are a man's birthright," he said. "Any man or any minister is a poor creature without them. But of course there are limits beyond which pulpit influence should not go, and I am sure Dr Drummond has the clearest perception of them. He seems to have been a wonderful fellow, Macdonald, a man with extraordinary power of imaginative enterprise. I wonder whether he would have seen his way to linking up the Empire as he linked up your Provinces here?"

"He'd have hated uncommonly to be in opposition, but I don't see how he could have helped it," Lorne said. "He was the godfather of Canadian manufacturers, you know—the Tories have always been the industrial party. He couldn't have gone for letting English stuff in free, or cheap; and yet he was genuinely loyal and attached to England. He would discriminate against Manchester with tears in his eyes! Imperialist in his time spelled Conservative, now it spells Liberal. The Conservatives have always talked the loudest about the British bond, but when it lately came to doing we're on record on the right side, and they're on record on the wrong. But it must make the old man's ghost sick to see—"

"To see his court suit stolen," Advena finished for him. "As Disraeli said—wasn't it Disraeli?" She heard, and hated the note of constraint in her voice. "Am I reduced," she thought, indignantly, "to falsetto?" and chose, since she must choose, the betrayal of silence.

"It did one good to hear the question discussed on the higher level," said Lorne. "You would think, to read the papers, that all its merits could be put into dollars and cents."

"I've noticed some of them in terms of sentiment—affection for the mother country—"

"Yes, that's lugged in. But it doesn't cover the moral aspect," Lorne returned. "It's too easy and obvious, as well; it gives the enemy cause to offend."

"Well, there's a tremendous moral aspect," Finlay said, "tremendous moral potentialities hidden in the issue. England has more to lose than she dreams."

"That's just where I felt, as a practical politician, a little restless while you were preaching," said Lorne, laughing. "You seemed to think the advantage of imperialism was all with England. You mustn't press that view on us, you know. We shall get harder to bargain with. Besides, from the point of your sermon, it's all the other way."

"Oh, I don't agree! The younger nations can work out their own salvation unaided; but can England alone? Isn't she too heavily weighted?"

"Oh, materially, very likely! But morally, no," said Lorne, stoutly. "There, if you like, she has accumulations that won't depreciate. Money isn't the only capital the colonies offer investment for."

"I'm afraid I see it in the shadow of the degeneration of age and poverty," said Finlay, smiling—"or age and wealth, if you prefer it."

"And we in the disadvantage of youth and easy success," Lorne retorted. "We're all very well, but we're not the men our fathers were: we need a lot of licking into shape. Look at that disgraceful business of ours in the Ontario legislature the other day, and look at that fellow of yours walking out of office at Westminster last session because of a disastrous business connection which he was morally as clear of as you or I! I tell you we've got to hang on to the things that make us ashamed; and I guess we've got sense enough to know it. But this is my corner. I am going to look in at the Milburns', Advena. Good night, Mr Finlay."

Advena, walking on with Finlay, became suddenly aware that he had not once addressed her. She had the quick impression that Lorne left him bereft of a refuge; his plight heartened her.

"If the politicians on both sides were only as mutually appreciative," she said, "the Empire would soon be knit."

For a moment he did not answer. "I am afraid the economic situation is not quite analogous," he said, stiffly and absently, when the moment had passed.

"Why does your brother always call me 'Mr' Finlay?" he demanded presently. "It isn't friendly."

The note of irritation in his voice puzzled her. "I think the form is commoner with us," she said, "even among men who know each other fairly well." Her secret glance flashed over the gulf that nevertheless divided Finlay and her brother, that would always divide them. She saw it with something like pain, which struggled through her pride in both. "And then, you know—your calling—"

"I suppose it is that," he replied, ill content.

"I've noticed Dr Drummond's way," she told him, with rising spirits. "It's delightful. He drops the 'Mr' with fellow-ministers of his own denomination only—never with Wesleyans or Baptists, for a moment. He always comes back very genial from the General Assembly, and full of stories. 'I said to Grant,' or 'Macdonald said to me'—and he always calls you 'Finlay,'" she added shyly. "By the way, I suppose you know he's to be the new Moderator?"

"Is he, indeed? Yes—yes, of course, I knew! We couldn't have a better."

They walked on through the early autumn night. It was just not raining. The damp air was cool and pungent with the smell of fallen leaves, which lay thick under their feet. Advena speared the dropped horse chestnut husks with the point of her umbrella as they went along. She had picked up half a dozen when he spoke again. "I want to tell you—I have to tell you—something—about myself, Miss Murchison."

"I should like," said Advena steadily, "to hear."

"It is a matter that has, I am ashamed to confess, curiously gone out of my mind of late—I should say until lately. There was little until lately—I am so poor a letter writer—to remind me of it. I am engaged to be married!"

"But how interesting!" exclaimed Advena.

He looked at her taken aback. His own mood was heavy; it failed to answer this lightness from her. It is hard to know what he expected, what his unconscious blood expected for him; but it was not this. If he had little wisdom about the hearts of women, he had less about their behaviour. She said nothing more, but inclined her head in an angle of deference and expectation toward what he should further communicate.

"I don't know that I have ever told you much about my life in Scotland," he went on. "It has always seemed to me so remote and—disconnected with everything here. I could not suppose it would interest anyone. I was cared for and educated by my father's only sister, a good woman. It was as if she had whole charge of the part of my life that was not absorbed in work. I don't know that I can make you understand. She was identified with all the rest—I left it to her. Shortly before I sailed for Canada she spoke to me of marriage in connection with my work and—welfare, and with—a niece of her husband's who was staying with us at the time, a person suitable in every way. Apart from my aunt, I do not know—However, I owed everything to her, and I—took her advice in the matter. I left it to her. She is a managing woman; but she can nearly always prove herself right. Her mind ran a great deal, a little too much perhaps, upon creature comforts, and I suppose she thought that in emigrating a man might do well to companion himself."

"That was prudent of her," said Advena.

He turned a look upon her. "You are not—making a mock of it?" he said.

"I am not making a mock of it."

"My aunt now writes to me that Miss Christie's home has been broken up by the death of her mother, and that if it can be arranged she is willing to come to me here. My aunt talks of bringing her. I am to write."

He said the last words slowly, as if he weighed them. They had passed the turning to the Murchisons', walking on with the single consciousness of a path under them, and space before them. Once or twice before that had happened, but Advena had always been aware. This time she did not know.

"You are to write," she said. She sought in vain for more words; he also, throwing back his head, appeared to search the firmament for phrases without result. Silence seemed enforced between them, and walked with them, on into the murky landscape, over the fallen leaves. Passing a streetlamp, they quickened their steps, looking furtively at the light, which seemed leagued against them with silence.

"It seems so extraordinarily—far away," said Hugh Finlay, of Bross, Dumfries, at length.

"But it will come near," Advena replied.

"I don't think it ever can."

She looked at him with a sudden leap of the heart, a wild, sweet dismay.

"They, of course, will come. But the life of which they are a part, and the man whom I remember to have been me—there is a gulf fixed—"

"It is only the Atlantic," Advena said. She had recovered her vision; in spite of the stone in her breast she could look. The weight and the hurt she would reckon with later. What was there, after all, to do? Meanwhile she could look, and already she saw with passion what had only begun to form itself in his consciousness, his strange, ironical, pitiful plight.

He shook his head. "It is not marked in any geography," he said, and gave her a troubled smile. "How can I make it clear to you? I have come here into a new world, of interests unknown and scope unguessed before. I know what you would say, but you have no way of learning the beauty and charm of mere vitality—you have always been so alive. One finds a physical freedom in which one's very soul seems to expand; one hears the happiest calls of fancy. And the most wonderful, most delightful thing of all is to discover that one is oneself, strangely enough, able to respond—"

The words reached the woman beside him like some cool dropping balm, healing, inconceivably precious. She knew her share in all this that he recounted. He might not dream of it, might well confound her with the general pulse; but she knew the sweet and separate subcurrent that her life had been in his, felt herself underlying all these new joys of his, could tell him how dear she was. But it seemed that he must not guess.

It came to her with force that his dim perception of his case was grotesque, that it humiliated him. She had a quick desire that he should at least know that civilized, sentient beings did not lend themselves to such outrageous comedies as this which he had confessed; it had somehow the air of a confession. She could not let him fall so lamentably short of man's dignity, of man's estate, for his own sake.

"It is a curious history," she said. "You are right in thinking I should not find it quite easy to understand. We make those—arrangements—so much more for ourselves over here. Perhaps we think them more important than they are."

"But they are of the highest importance." He stopped short, confounded.

"I shall try to consecrate my marriage," he said presently, more to himself than to Advena.

Her thought told him bitterly: "I am afraid it is the only thing you can do with it," but something else came to her lips.

"I have not congratulated you. I am not sure," she went on, with astonishing candour, "whether I can. But I wish you happiness with all my heart. Are you happy now?"

He turned his great dark eyes on her. "I am as happy, I dare say, as I have any need to be."

"But you are happier since your letter came?"

"No," he said. The simple word fell on her heart, and she forbore.

They went on again in silence until they arrived at a place from which they saw the gleam of the river and the line of the hills beyond. Advena stopped.

"We came here once before together—in the spring. Do you remember?" she asked.

"I remember very well." She had turned, and he with her. They stood together with darkness about them, through which they could just see each other's faces.

"It was spring then, and I went back alone. You are still living up that street? Good night, then, please. I wish again—to go back—alone."

He looked at her for an instant in dumb bewilderment, though her words were simple enough. Then as she made a step away from him he caught her hand.

"Advena," he faltered, "what has happened to us? This time I cannot let you."



CHAPTER XIX

"Lorne," said Dora Milburn, in her most animated manner, "who do you think is coming to Elgin? Your London friend, Mr Hesketh! He's going to stay with the Emmetts, and Mrs Emmett is perfectly distracted; she says he's accustomed to so much, she doesn't know how he will put up with their plain way of living. Though what she means by that, with late dinner and afternoon tea every day of her life, is more than I know."

"Why, that's splendid!" replied Lorne. "Good old Hesketh! I knew he thought of coming across this fall, but the brute hasn't written to me. We'll have to get him over to our place. When he gets tired of the Emmetts' plain ways he can try ours—they're plainer. You'll like Hesketh; he's a good fellow, and more go-ahead than most of them."

"I don't think I should ask him to stay if I were you, Lorne. Your mother will never consent to change her hours for meals. I wouldn't dream of asking an Englishman to stay if I couldn't give him late dinner; they think so much of it. It's the trial of Mother's life that Father will not submit to it. As a girl she was used to nothing else. Afternoon tea we do have, he can't prevent that, but Father kicks at anything but one o'clock dinner and meat tea at six, and I suppose he always will."

"Doesn't one tea spoil the other?" Lorne inquired. "I find it does when I go to your minister's and peck at a cress sandwich at five. You haven't any appetite for a reasonable meal at six. But I guess it won't matter to Hesketh; he's got a lot of sense about things of that sort. Why he served out in South Africa—volunteered. Mrs Emmett needn't worry. And if we find him pining for afternoon tea we can send him over here."

"Well, if he's nice. But I suppose he's pretty sure to be nice. Any friend of the Emmetts—What is he like, Lorne?"

"Oh, he's just a young man with a moustache! You seem to see a good many over there. They're all alike while they're at school in round coats, and after they leave school they get moustaches, and then they're all alike again."

"I wish you wouldn't tease. How tall is he? Is he fair or dark? What colour are his eyes?"

Lorne buried his head in his hands in a pretended agony of recollection.

"So far as I remember, not exactly tall, but you wouldn't call him short. Complexion—well, don't you know?—that kind of middling complexion. Colour of his eyes—does anybody ever notice a thing like that? You needn't take my word for it, but I should say they were a kind of average coloured eyes."

"Lorne! You ARE—I suppose I'll just have to wait till I see him. But the girls are wild to know, and I said I'd ask you. He'll be here in about two weeks anyhow, and I dare say we won't find him so much to make a fuss about. The best sort of Englishmen don't come over such a very great deal, as you say. I expect they have a better time at home."

"Hesketh's a very good sort of Englishman," said Lorne.

"He's awfully well off, isn't he?"

"According to our ideas I suppose he is," said Lorne. "Not according to English ideas."

"Still less according to New York ones, then," asserted Dora. "They wouldn't think much of it there even if he passed for rich in England." It was a little as if she resented Lorne's comparison of standards, and claimed the American one as at least cis-Atlantic.

"He has a settled income," said Lorne, "and he's never had to work for it, whatever luck there is in that. That's all I know. Dora—"

"Now, Lorne, you're not to be troublesome."

"Your mother hasn't come in at all this evening. Don't you think it's a good sign?"

"She isn't quite so silly as she was," remarked Dora. "Why I should not have the same freedom as other girls in entertaining my gentleman friends I never could quite see."

"I believe if we told her we had made up our minds it would be all right," he pleaded.

"I'm not so sure Lorne. Mother's so deep. You can't always tell just by what she DOES. She thinks Stephen Stuart likes me—it's too perfectly idiotic; we are the merest friends—and when it's any question of you and Stephen—well, she doesn't say anything, but she lets me see! She thinks such a lot of the Stuarts because Stephen's father was Ontario Premier once, and got knighted."

"I might try for that myself if you think it would please her," said the lover.

"Please her! And I should be Lady Murchison!" she let fall upon his ravished ears. "Why, Lorne, she'd just worship us both! But you'll never do it."

"Why not?"

Dora looked at him with pretty speculation. She had reasons for supposing that she did admire the young man.

"You're too nice," she said.

"That isn't good enough," he responded, and drew her nearer.

"Then why did you ask me?—No, Lorne, you are not to. Suppose Father came in?"

"I shouldn't mind—Father's on my side, I think."

"Father isn't on anybody's side," said his daughter, wisely.

"Dora, let me speak to him!"

Miss Milburn gave a clever imitation of a little scream of horror.

"INDEED I won't! Lorne, you are never, NEVER to do that! As if we were in a ridiculous English novel!"

"That's the part of an English novel I always like," said Lorne. "The going and asking. It must about scare the hero out of a year's growth; but it's a glorious thing to do—it would be next day, anyhow."

"It's just the sort of thing to please Mother," Dora meditated, "but she can't be indulged all the time. No, Lorne, you'll have to leave it to me—when there's anything to tell."

"There's everything to tell now," said he, who had indeed nothing to keep back.

"But you know what Mother is, Lorne. Suppose they hadn't any objection, she would never keep it to herself! She'd want to go announcing it all over the place; she'd think it was the proper thing to do."

"But, Dora, why not? If you knew how I want to announce it! I should like to publish it in the sunrise—and the wind—so that I couldn't go out of doors without seeing it myself."

"I shouldn't mind having it in Toronto Society, when the time comes. But not yet, Lorne—not for ages. I'm only twenty-two—nobody thinks of settling down nowadays before she's twenty-five at the very earliest. I don't know a single girl in this town that has—among my friends, anyway. That's three years off, and you CAN'T expect me to be engaged for three years."

"No." said Lorne, "engaged six months, married the rest of the time. Or the periods might run concurrently if you preferred—I shouldn't mind."

"An engaged girl has the very worst time. She gets hardly any attention, and as to dances—well, it's a good thing for her if the person she's engaged to CAN dance," she added, teasingly.

Lorne coloured. "You said I was improving, Dora," he said, and then laughed at the childish claim. "But that isn't really a thing that counts, is it? If our lives only keep step it won't matter much about the 'Washington Post.' And so far as attention goes, you'll get it as long as you live, you little princess. Besides, isn't it better to wear the love of one man than the admiration of half a dozen?"

"And be teased and worried half out of your life by everybody you meet? Now, Lorne, you're getting serious and sentimental, and you know I hate that. It isn't any good either—Mother always used to say it made me more stubborn to appeal to me. Horrid nature to have, isn't it?"

Lorne's hand went to his waistcoat pocket and came back with a tiny packet. "It's come, Dora—by this morning's English mail."

Her eyes sparkled, and then rested with guarded excitement upon the little case. "Oh, Lorne!"

She said nothing more, but watched intently while he found the spring, and disclosed the ring within. Then she drew a long breath. "Lorne Murchison, what a lovely one!"

"Doesn't it look," said he, "just a little serious and sentimental?"

"But SUCH good style, too," he declared, bending over it. "And quite new—I haven't seen anything a bit like it. I do love a design when it's graceful. Solitaires are so old-fashioned."

He kept his eyes upon her face, feeding upon the delight in it. Exultation rose up in him: he knew the primitive guile of man, indifferent to such things, alluring with them the other creature. He did not stop to condone her weakness; rather he seized it in ecstasy; it was all part of the glad scheme to help the lover. He turned the diamonds so that they flashed and flashed again before her. Then, trusting his happy instinct, he sought for her hand. But she held that back. "I want to SEE it," she declared, and he was obliged to let her take the ring in her own way and examine it, and place it in every light, and compare it with others worn by her friends, and make little tentative charges of extravagance in his purchase of it, while he sat elated and adoring, the simple fellow.

Reluctantly at last she gave up her hand. "But it's only trying on—not putting on," she told him. He said nothing till it flashed upon her finger, and in her eyes he saw a spark from below of that instinctive cupidity toward jewels that man can never recognize as it deserves in woman, because of his desire to gratify it.

"You'll wear it, Dora?" he pleaded.

"Lorne, you are the dearest fellow! But how could I? Everybody would guess!"

Her gaze, nevertheless, rested fascinated on the ring, which she posed as it pleased her.

"Let them guess! I'd rather they knew, but—it does look well on your finger, dear."

She held it up once more to the light, then slipped it decisively off and gave it back to him. "I can't, you know, Lorne. I didn't really say you might get it; and now you'll have to keep it till—till the time comes. But this much I will say—it's the sweetest thing, and you've shown the loveliest taste, and if it weren't such a dreadful give-away I'd like to wear it awfully."

They discussed it with argument, with endearment, with humour, and reproach, but her inflexible basis soon showed through their talk: she would not wear the ring. So far he prevailed, that it was she, not he, who kept it. Her insistence that he should take it back brought something like anger out of him; and in the surprise of this she yielded so much. She did it unwillingly at the time, but afterward, when she tried on the thing again in the privacy of her own room; she was rather satisfied to have it, safe under lock and key, a flashing, smiling mystery to visit when she liked and reveal when she would.

"Lorne could never get me such a beauty again if he lost it," she advised herself, "and he's awfully careless. And I'm not sure that I won't tell Eva Delarue, just to show it to her. She's as close as wax."

One feels a certain sorrow for the lover on his homeward way, squaring his shoulders against the foolish perversity of the feminine mind, resolutely guarding his heart from any hint of real reprobation. Through the sweetness of her lips and the affection of her pretty eyes, through all his half-possession of all her charms and graces, must have come dully the sense of his great occasion manque, that dear day of love when it leaves the mark of its claim. And in one's regret there is perhaps some alloy of pity, that less respectful thing. We know him elsewhere capable of essaying heights, yet we seem to look down upon the drama of his heart. It may be well to remember that the level is not everything in love. He who carefully adjusts an intellectual machine may descry a higher mark; he can construct nothing in a mistress; he is, therefore, able to see the facts and to discriminate the desirable. But Lorne loved with all his imagination. This way dares the imitation of the gods by which it improves the quality of the passion, so that such a love stands by itself to be considered, apart from the object, one may say. A strong and beautiful wave lifted Lorne Murchison along to his destiny, since it was the pulse of his own life, though Dora Milburn played moon to it.



CHAPTER XX

Alfred Hesketh had, after all, written to young Murchison about his immediate intention of sailing for Canada and visiting Elgin; the letter arrived a day or two later. It was brief and businesslike, but it gave Lorne to understand that since his departure the imperial idea had been steadily fermenting, not only in the national mind, but particularly in Hesketh's; that it produced in his case a condition only to be properly treated by personal experience. Hesketh was coming over to prove whatever advantage there was in seeing for yourself. That he was coming with the right bias Lorne might infer, he said, from the fact that he had waited a fortnight to get his passage by the only big line to New York that stood out for our mercantile supremacy against American combination.

"He needn't bother to bring any bias," Lorne remarked when he had read this, "but he'll have to pay a lot of extra luggage on the one he takes back with him."

He felt a little irritation at being offered the testimony of the Cunard ticket. Back on his native soil, its independence ran again like sap in him: nobody wanted a present of good will; the matter stood on its merits.

He was glad, nevertheless, that Hesketh was coming, gratified that it would now be his turn to show prospects, and turn figures into facts, and make plain the imperial profit from the further side. Hesketh was such an intelligent fellow, there would be the keenest sort of pleasure in demonstrating things, big things, to him, little things, too, ways of living, differences of habit. Already in the happy exercise of his hospitable instinct he saw how Hesketh would get on with his mother, with Stella, with Dr Drummond. He saw Hesketh interested, domiciled, remaining—the ranch life this side of the Rockies, Lorne thought, would tempt him, or something new and sound in Winnipeg. He kept his eye open for chances, and noted one or two likely things. "We want labour mostly," he said to Advena, "but nobody is refused leave to land because he has a little money."

"I should think not, indeed," remarked Mrs Murchison, who was present. "I often wish your father and I had had a little more when we began. That whole Gregory block was going for three thousand dollars then. I wonder what it's worth now?"

"Yes, but you and Father are worth more, too," remarked Stella acutely.

"In fact, all the elder members of the family have approximated in value, Stella," said her brother, "and you may too, in time."

"I'll take my chance with the country," she retorted. They were all permeated with the question of the day; even Stella, after holding haughtily aloof for some time, had been obliged to get into step, as she described it, with the silly old Empire. Whatever it was in England, here it was a family affair; I mean in the town of Elgin, in the shops and the offices, up and down the tree-bordered streets as men went to and from their business, atomic creatures building the reef of the future, but conscious, and wanting to know what they were about. Political parties had long declared themselves, the Hampden Debating Society had had several grand field nights. Prospective lifelong friendships, male and female in every form of "the Collegiate," had been put to this touchstone, sometimes with shattering effect. If you would not serve with Wallingham the greatness of Britain you were held to favour going over to the United States; there was no middle course. It became a personal matter in the ward schools and small boys pursued small boys with hateful cries of "Annexationist!" The subject even trickled about the apple-barrels and potato-bags of the market square. Here it should have raged, pregnant as it was with bucolic blessing; but our agricultural friends expect nothing readily except adverse weather, least of all a measure of economic benefit to themselves. Those of Fox County thought it looked very well, but it was pretty sure to work out some other way. Elmore Crow failed heavily to catch a light even from Lorne Murchison.

"You keep your hair on, Lorne," he advised. "We ain't going to get such big changes yet. An' if we do the blooming syndicates 'll spoil 'em for us."

There were even dissentients among the farmers. The voice of one was raised who had lived laborious years, and many of them in the hope of seeing his butter and cheese go unimpeded across the American line. It must be said, however, that still less attention was paid to him, and it was generally conceded that he would die without the sight.

It was the great topic. The day Wallingham went his defiant furthest in the House and every colonial newspaper set it up in acclaiming headlines, Horace Williams, enterprising fellow, remembered that Lorne had seen the great man under circumstances that would probably pan out, and send round Rawlins. Rawlins was to get something that would do to call "Wallingham in the Bosom of his Family," and as much as Lorne cared to pour into him about his own view of the probable issue. Rawlins failed to get the interview, came back to say that Lorne didn't seem to think himself a big enough boy for that, but he did not return empty-handed. Mr Murchison sent Mr Williams the promise of some contributions upon the question of the hour, which he had no objection to sign and which Horace should have for the good of the cause. Horace duly had them, the Express duly published them, and they were copied in full by the Dominion and several other leading journals, with an amount of comment which everyone but Mrs Murchison thought remarkable.

"I don't pretend to understand it," she said, "but anybody can see that he knows what he's talking about." John Murchison read them with a critical eye and a pursed-out lip.

"He takes too much for granted."

"What does he take for granted?" asked Mrs Murchison.

"Other folks being like himself," said the father.

That, no doubt, was succinct and true; nevertheless, the articles had competence as well as confidence. The writer treated facts with restraint and conditions with sympathy. He summoned ideas from the obscurity of men's minds, and marshalled them in the light, so that many recognized what they had been trying to think. He wrote with homeliness as well as force, wishing much more to make the issue recognizable than to create fine phrases, with the result that one or two of his sentences passed into the language of the discussion which, as any of its standard-bearers would have told you, had little use for rhetoric. The articles were competent: if you listened to Horace Williams you would have been obliged to accept them as the last, or latest, word of economic truth, though it must be left to history to endorse Mr Williams. It was their enthusiasm, however, that gave them the wing on which they travelled. People naturally took different views, even of this quality. "Young Murchison's working the imperial idea for all it's worth," was Walter Winter's; and Octavius Milburn humorously summed up the series as "tall talk."

Alfred Hesketh came, it was felt, rather opportunely into the midst of this. Plenty of people, the whole of Market Square and East Elgin, a good part, too, probably, of the Town Ward, were unaware of his arrival; but for the little world he penetrated he was clothed with all the interest of the great contingency. His decorous head in the Emmetts' pew on Sunday morning stood for a symbol as well as for a stranger. The nation was on the eve of a great far-reaching transaction with the mother country, and thrilling with the terms of the bargain. Hesketh was regarded by people in Elgin who knew who he was with the mingled cordiality and distrust that might have met a principal. They did not perhaps say it, but it was in their minds. "There's one of them," was what they thought when they met him in the street. At any other time he would have been just an Englishman; now he was invested with the very romance of destiny. The perception was obscure, but it was there. Hesketh, on the other hand, found these good people a very well-dressed, well-conditioned, decent lot, rather sallower than he expected, perhaps, who seemed to live in a fair-sized town in a great deal of comfort, and was wholly unconscious of anything special in his relation to them or theirs to him.

He met Lorne just outside the office of Warner, Fulke, and Murchison the following day. They greeted heartily. "Now this IS good!" said Lorne, and he thought so. Hesketh confided his first impression. "It's not unlike an English country town," he said, "only the streets are wider, and the people don't look so much in earnest."

"Oh, they're just as much in earnest some of the time," Lorne laughed, "but maybe not all the time!"

The sun shone crisply round them; there was a brisk October market; on the other side of the road Elmore Crow dangled his long legs over a cart flap and chewed a cheroot. Elgin was abroad, doing business on its wide margin of opportunity. Lorne cast a backward glance at conditions he had seen.

"I know what you mean," he said. "Sharp of you to spot it so soon, old chap! You're staying with the English Church minister, aren't you—Mr Emmett? Some connection of yours, aren't they?"

"Mrs Emmett is Chafe's sister—Mrs Chafe, you know, is my aunt," Hesketh reminded him. "I say, Murchison, I left old Chafe wilder than ever. Wallingham's committee keep sending him leaflets and things. They take it for granted he's on the right side, since his interests are. The other day they asked him for a subscription! The old boy sent his reply to the Daily News and carried it about for a week. I think that gave him real satisfaction; but he hates the things by post."

Lorne laughed delightedly. "I expect he's snowed under with them. I sent him my own valuable views last week."

"I'm afraid they'll only stiffen him. That got to be his great argument after you left, the fact that you fellows over here want it. He doesn't approve of a bargain if the other side sees a profit. Curiously enough, his foremen and people out in Chiswick are all for it. I was talking to one of them just before I left—'Stands to reason, sir,' he said, 'we don't want to pay more for a loaf than we do now. But we'll do it, sir, if it means downing them Germans; he said."

Lorne's eyebrows half-perceptibly twitched. "They do 'sir' you a lot over there, don't they?" he said. "It was as much as I could do to get at what a fellow of that sort meant, tumbling over the 'sirs' he propped it up with. Well, all kinds of people, all kinds of argument, I suppose, when it comes to trying to get 'em solid! But I was going to say we are all hoping you'll give us a part of your time while you're in Elgin. My family are looking forward to meeting you. Come along and let me introduce you to my father now—he's only round the corner."

"By all means!" said Hesketh, and they fell into step together. As Lorne said, it was only a short distance, but far enough to communicate a briskness, an alertness, from the step of one young man to that of the other. "I wish it were five miles," Hesketh said, all his stall-fed muscles responding to the new call of his heart and lungs. "Any good walks about here? I asked Emmett, but he didn't know—supposed you could walk to Clayfield if you didn't take the car. He seems to have lost his legs. I suppose parsons do."

"Not all of them," said Lorne. "There's a fellow that has a church over in East Elgin, Finlay his name is, that beats the record of anything around here. He just about ranges the county in the course of a week."

"The place is too big for one parish, no doubt," Hesketh remarked.

"Oh, he's a Presbyterian! The Episcopalians haven't got any hold to speak of over there. Here we are," said Lorne, and turned in at the door. The old wooden sign was long gone. "John Murchison and Sons" glittered instead in the plate-glass windows, but Hesketh did not see it.

"Why do you think he'll be in here?" he asked, on young Murchison's heels.

"Because he always is when he isn't over at the shop," replied Lorne. "It's his place of business—his store, you know. There he is! Hard luck—he's got a customer. We'll have to wait."

He went on ahead with his impetuous step; he did not perceive the instant's paralysis that seemed to overtake Hesketh's, whose foot dragged, however, no longer than that. It was an initiation; he had been told he might expect some. He checked his impulse to be amused, and guarded his look round, not to show unseemly curiosity. His face, when he was introduced to Alec, who was sorting some odd dozens of tablespoons, was neutral and pleasant. He reflected afterward that he had been quite equal to the occasion. He thought, too, that he had shown some adaptability. Alec was not a person of fluent discourse, and when he had inquired whether Hesketh was going to make a long stay, the conversation might have languished but for this.

"Is that Birmingham?" he asked, nodding kindly at the spoons.

"Came to us through a house in Liverpool," Alec responded. "I expect you had a stormy crossing, Mr Hesketh."

"It was a bit choppy. We had the fiddles on most of the time," Hesketh replied. "Most of the time. Now, how do you find the bicycle trade over here? Languishing, as it is with us?"

"Oh, it keeps up pretty well," said Alec, "but we sell more spoons. 'N' what do you think of this country, far as you've seen it?"

"Oh, come now, it's a little soon to ask, isn't it? Yes—I suppose bicycles go out of fashion, and spoons never do. I was thinking," added Hesketh, casting his eyes over a serried rank, "of buying a bicycle."

Alec had turned to put the spoons in their place on the shelves. "Better take your friend across to Cox's," he advised Lorne over his shoulder. "He'll be able to get a motorbike there," a suggestion which gave Mr Hesketh to reflect later that if that was the general idea of doing business it must be an easy country to make money in.

The customer was satisfied at last, and Mr Murchison walked sociably to the door with him; it was the secretary of the local Oddfellows' Lodge, who had come in about a furnace.

"Now's our chance," said Lorne. "Father, this is Mr Hesketh, from London—my father, Hesketh. He can tell you all you want to know about Canada—this part of it, anyway. Over thirty years, isn't it, Father, since you came out?"

"Glad to meet you," said John Murchison, "glad to meet you, Mr Hesketh. We've heard much about you."

"You must have been quite among the pioneers of Elgin, Mr Murchison," said Hesketh as they shook hands. Alec hadn't seemed to think of that; Hesketh put it down to the counter.

"Not quite," said John. "We'll say among the early arrivals."

"Have you ever been back in your native Scotland?" asked Hesketh.

"Aye, twice."

"But you prefer the land of your adoption?"

"I do. But I think by now it'll be kin," said Mr Murchison. "It was good to see the heather again, but a man lives best where he's taken root."

"Yes, yes. You seem to do a large business here, Mr Murchison."

"Pretty well for the size of the place. You must get Lorne to take you over Elgin. It's a fair sample of our rising manufacturing towns."

"I hope he will. I understand you manufacture to some extent yourself?"

"We make our own stoves and a few odd things."

"You don't send any across the Atlantic yet?" queried Hesketh jocularly.

"Not yet. No, sir!"

Then did Mr Hesketh show himself in true sympathy with the novel and independent conditions of the commonwealth he found himself in.

"I beg you won't use that form with me," he said, "I know it isn't the custom of the country, and I am a friend of your son's, you see."

The iron merchant looked at him, just an instant's regard, in which astonishment struggled with the usual deliberation. Then his considering hand went to his chin.

"I see. I must remember," he said.

The son, Lorne, glanced in the pause beyond John Murchison's broad shoulders, through the store door and out into the moderate commerce of Main Street, which had carried the significance and the success of his father's life. His eye came back and moved over the contents of the place, taking stock of it, one might say, and adjusting the balance with pride. He had said very little since they had been in the store. Now he turned to Hesketh quietly.

"I wouldn't bother about that if I were you," he said. "My father spoke quite—colloquially."

"Oh!" said Hesketh.

They parted on the pavement outside. "I hope you understand," said Lorne, with an effort at heartiness, "how glad my parents will be to have you if you find yourself able to spare us any of your time?"

"Thanks very much," said Hesketh; "I shall certainly give myself the pleasure of calling as soon as possible."



CHAPTER XXI

"Dear me!" said Dr Drummond. "Dear me! Well! And what does Advena Murchison say to all this?"

He and Hugh Finlay were sitting in the Doctor's study, the pleasantest room in the house. It was lined with standard religious philosophy, standard poets, standard fiction, all that was standard, and nothing that was not; and the shelves included several volumes of the Doctor's own sermons, published in black morocco through a local firm that did business by the subscription method, with "Drummond" in gold letters on the back. There were more copies of these, perhaps, than it would be quite thoughtful to count, though a good many were annually disposed of at the church bazaar, where the Doctor presented them with a generous hand. A sumptuous desk, and luxurious leather-covered armchairs furnished the room; a beautiful little Parian copy of a famous Cupid and Psyche decorated the mantelpiece, and betrayed the touch of pagan in the Presbyterian. A bright fire burned in the grate, and there was not a speck of dust anywhere.

Dr Drummond, lost in his chair, with one knee dropped on the other, joined his fingers at the tips, and drew his forehead into a web of wrinkles. Over it his militant grey crest curled up; under it his eyes darted two shrewd points of interrogation.

"What does Miss Murchison say to it?" he repeated with craft and courage, as Finlay's eyes dropped and his face slowly flushed under the question. It was in this room that Dr Drummond examined "intending communicants" and cases likely to come before the Session; he never shirked a leading question. "Miss Murchison," said Finlay, after a moment, "was good enough to say that she thought her father's house would be open to Miss—to my friends when they arrived; but I thought it would be more suitable to ask your hospitality, sir."

"Did she so?" asked Dr Drummond gravely. It was more a comment than an inquiry. "Did she so?" Infinite kindness was in it.

The young man assented with an awkward gesture, half-bend, half-nod, and neither for a moment spoke again. It was one of those silences with a character, conscious, tentative. Half-veiled, disavowed thoughts rose up in it, awakened by Advena's name, turning away their heads. The ticking of the Doctor's old-fashioned watch came through it from his waistcoat pocket. It was he who spoke first.

"I christened Advena Murchison," he said. "Her father was one of those who called me, as a young man, to this ministry. The names of both her parents are on my first communion roll. Aye!"...

The fire snapped and the watch went on ticking.

"So Advena thought well of it all. Did she so?"

The young man raised his heavy eyes and looked unflinchingly at Dr Drummond.

"Miss Murchison," he said, "is the only other person to whom I have confided the matter. I have written, fixing that date, with her approval—at her desire. Not immediately. I took time to—think it over. Then it seemed better to arrange for the ladies reception first, so before posting I have come to you."

"Then the letter has not gone?"

"It is in my pocket."

"Finlay, you will have a cigar? I don't smoke myself; my throat won't stand it; but I understand these are passable. Grant left them here. He's a chimney, that man Grant. At it day and night."

This was a sacrifice. Dr Drummond hated tobacco, the smell of it, the ash of it, the time consumed in it. There was no need at all to offer Finlay one of the Reverend Grant's cigars. Propitiation must indeed be desired when the incense is abhorred. But Finlay declined to smoke. The Doctor, with his hands buried deep in his trousers pockets, where something metallic clinked in them, began to pace and turn. His mouth had the set it wore when he handled a difficult motion in the General Assembly.

"I'm surprised to hear that, Finlay; though it may be well not to be surprised at what a woman will say—or won't say."

"Surprised?" said the younger man confusedly. "Why should anyone be surprised?"

"I know her well. I've watched her grow up. I remember her mother's trouble because she would scratch the paint on the pew in front of her with the nails in her little boots. John Murchison sang in the choir in those days. He had a fine bass voice; he has it still. And Mrs Murchison had to keep the family in order by herself. It was sometimes as much as she could do, poor woman. They sat near the front, and many a good hard look I used to give them while I was preaching. Knox Church was a different place then. The choir sat in the back gallery, and we had a precentor, a fine fellow—he lost an arm at Ridgway in the Fenian raid. Well I mind him and the frown he would put on when he took up the fork. But, for that matter, every man Jack in the choir had a frown on in the singing, though the bass fellows would be the fiercest. We've been twice enlarged since, and the organist has long been a salaried professional. But I doubt whether the praise of God is any heartier than it was when it followed Peter Craig's tuning-fork. Aye. You'd always hear John Murchison's note in the finish."

Finlay was listening with the look of a charmed animal. Dr Drummond's voice was never more vibrant, more moving, more compelling than when he called up the past; and here to Finlay the past was itself enchanted.

"She always had those wonderful dark eyes. She's pale enough now, but as a child she was rosy. Taking her place of a winter evening, with the snow on her fur cap and her hair, I often thought her a picture. I liked to have her attention while I was preaching, even as a child; and when she was absent I missed her. It was through my ministrations that she saw her way to professing the Church of Christ, and under my heartfelt benediction that she first broke bread in her Father's house. I hold the girl in great affection, Finlay; and I grieve to hear this."

The other drew a long breath, and his hand tightened on the arm of his chair. He was, as we know, blind to many of the world's aspects, even to those in which he himself figured; and Dr Drummond's plain hypothesis of his relations with Advena came before him in forced illumination, flash by tragic flash. This kind of revelation is more discomforting than darkness, since it carries the surprise of assault, and Finlay groped in it, helpless and silent.

"You are grieved, sir?" he said mechanically.

"Man, she loves you!" exclaimed the Doctor, in a tone that would no longer forbear.

Hugh Finlay seemed to take the words just where they were levelled, in his breast. He half leaped from his chair; the lower part of his face had the rigidity of iron.

"I am not obliged to discuss such a matter as that," he said hoarsely, "with you or with any man."

He looked confusedly about him for his hat, which he had left in the hall; and Dr Drummond profited by the instant. He stepped across and laid a hand on the younger man's shoulder. Had they both been standing the gesture would have been impossible to Dr Drummond with dignity; as it was, it had not only that, but benignance, a kind of tender good will, rare in expression with the minister, rare, for that matter, in feeling with him too, though the chord was always there to be sounded.

"Finlay," he said; "Finlay!"

Between two such temperaments the touch and the tone together made an extraordinary demonstration. Finlay, with an obvious effort, let it lie upon him. The tension of his body relaxed, that of his soul he covered, leaning forward and burying his head in his hands.

"Will you say I have no claim to speak?" asked Dr Drummond, and met silence. "It is upon my lips to beg you not to send that letter, Finlay." He took his hand from the young man's shoulder, inserted a thumb in each of his waistcoat pockets, and resumed his walk.

"On my own account I must send it," said Finlay. "On Miss Murchison's—she bids me to. We have gone into the matter together."

"I can imagine what you made of it together. There's a good deal of her father in Advena. He would be the last man to say a word for himself. You told her this tale you have told me, and she told you to get Miss Christie out and marry her without delay, eh? And what would you expect her to tell you—a girl of that spirit?"

"I cannot see why pride should influence her."

"Then you know little about women. It was pride, pure and simple, Finlay, that made her tell you that—and she'll be a sorry woman if you act on it."

"No," said Finlay, suddenly looking up, "I may know little about women, but I know more about Advena Murchison than that. She advised me in the sense she thought right and honourable, and her advice was sincere. And, Dr Drummond, deeply as I feel the bearing of Miss Murchison's view of the matter, I could not, in any case, allow my decision to rest upon it. It must stand by itself."

"You mean that your decision to marry to oblige your aunt should not be influenced by the fact that it means the wrecking of your own happiness and that of another person. I can't agree, Finlay. I spoke first of Advena Murchison because her part and lot in it are most upon my heart. I feel, too, that someone should put her case. Her own father would never open his lips. If you're to be hauled over the coals about this I'm the only man to do it. And I'm going to."

A look of sharp determination came into the minister's eyes; he had the momentary air of a small Scotch terrier with a bidding. Finlay looked at him in startled recognition of another possible phase of his dilemma; he thought he knew it in every wretched aspect. It was a bold reference of Dr Drummond's; it threw down the last possibility of withdrawal for Finlay; they must have it out now, man to man, with a little, perhaps, even in that unlikely place, of penitent to confessor. It was an exigency, it helped Finlay to pull himself together, and there was something in his voice, when he spoke, like the vibration of relief.

"I am pained and distressed more than I have any way of telling you, sir," he said, "that—the state of feeling—between Miss Murchison and myself should have been so plain to you. It is incomprehensible to me that it should be so, since it is only very lately that I have understood it truly myself. I hope you will believe that it was the strangest, most unexpected, most sudden revelation."

He paused and looked timidly at the Doctor; he, the great fellow, in straining bondage to his heart, leaning forward with embarrassed tension in every muscle, Dr Drummond alert, poised, critical, balancing his little figure on the hearthrug.

"I preach faith in miracles," he said. "I dare say between you and her it would be just that."

"I have been deeply culpable. Common sense, common knowledge of men and women should have warned me that there might be danger. But I looked upon the matter as our own—as between us only. I confess that I have not till now thought of that part of it, but surely—You cannot mean to tell me that what I have always supposed my sincere and devoted friendship for Miss Murchison has been in any way prejudicial—"

"To her in the ordinary sense? To her prospects of marriage and her standing in the eyes of the community? No, Finlay. No. I have not heard the matter much referred to. You seem to have taken none of the ordinary means—you have not distinguished her in the eyes of gossip. If you had it would be by no means the gravest thing to consider. Such tokens are quickly forgotten, especially here, where attentions of the kind often, I've noticed, lead to nothing. It is the fact, and not the appearance of it, that I speak of—that I am concerned with."

"The fact is beyond mending," said Finlay, dully.

"Aye, the fact is beyond mending. It is beyond mending that Advena Murchison belongs to you and you to her in no common sense. It's beyond mending that you cannot now be separated without such injury to you both as I would not like to look upon. It's beyond mending, Finlay, because it is one of those things that God has made. But it is not beyond marring, and I charge you to look well what you are about in connection with it."

A flash of happiness, of simple delight, lit the young man's sombre eyes as the phrases fell. To the minister they were mere forcible words; to Finlay they were soft rain in a famished land. Then he looked again heavily at the pattern of the carpet.

"Would you have me marry Advena Murchison?" he said, with a kind of shamed yielding to the words.

"I would—and no other. Man, I saw it from the beginning!" exclaimed the Doctor. "I don't say it isn't an awkward business. But at least there'll be no heartbreak in Scotland. I gather you never said a word to the Bross lady on the subject, and very few on any other. You tell me you left it all with that good woman, your aunt, to arrange after you left. Do you think a creature of any sentiment would have accepted you on those terms? Not she. So far as I can make out, Miss Cameron is just a sensible, wise woman that would be the first to see the folly in this business if she knew the rights of it. Come, Finlay, you're not such a great man with the ladies—you can't pretend she has any affection for you."

The note of raillery in the Doctor's voice drew Finlay's brows together.

"I don't know," he said, "whether I have to think of her affections, but I do know I have to think of her dignity, her confidence, and her belief in the honourable dealing of a man whom she met under the sanction of a trusted roof. The matter may look light here; it is serious there. She has her circle of friends; they are acquainted with her engagement. She has made all her arrangements to carry it out; she has disposed of her life. I cannot ask her to reconsider her lot because I have found a happier adjustment for mine."

"Finlay," said Dr Drummond, "you will not be known in Bross or anywhere else as a man who has jilted a woman. Is that it?"

"I will not be a man who has jilted a woman."

"There is no sophist like pride. Look at the case on its merits. On the one side a disappointment for Miss Cameron. I don't doubt she's counting on coming, but at worst a worldly disappointment. And the very grievous humiliation for you of writing to tell her that you have made a mistake. You deserve that, Finlay. If you wouldn't be a man who has jilted a woman you have no business to lend yourself to such matters with the capacity of a blind kitten. That is the damage on the one side. On the other—"

"I know all that there is to be said," interrupted Finlay, "on the other."

"Then face it, man. Go home and write the whole truth to Bross. I'll do it for you—no, I won't, either. Stand up to it yourself. You must hurt one of two women; choose the one that will suffer only in her vanity. I tell you that Scotch entanglement of yours is pure cardboard farce—it won't stand examination. It's appalling to think that out of an extravagant, hypersensitive conception of honour, egged on by that poor girl, you could be capable of turning it into the reality of your life."

"I've taken all these points of view, sir, and I can't throw the woman over. The objection to it isn't in reason—it's somehow in the past and the blood. It would mean the sacrifice of all that I hold most valuable in myself. I should expect myself after that to stick at nothing—why should I?"

"There is one point of view that perhaps you have not taken," said Dr Drummond, in his gravest manner. "You are settled here in your charge. In all human probability you will remain here in East Elgin, as I have remained here, building and fortifying the place you have won for the Lord in the hearts of the people. Advena Murchison's life will also go on here—there is nothing to take it away. You have both strong natures. Are you prepared for that?"

"We are both prepared for it. We shall both be equal to it. I count upon her, and she counts upon me, to furnish in our friendship the greater part of whatever happiness life may have in store for us."

"Then you must be a pair of born lunatics!" said Dr Drummond, his jaw grim, his eyes snapping. "What you propose is little less than a crime, Finlay. It can come to nothing but grief, if no worse. And your wife, poor woman, whatever she deserves, it is better than that! My word, if she could choose her prospect, think you she would hesitate? Finlay, I entreat you as a matter of ordinary prudence, go home and break it off. Leave Advena out of it—you have no business to make this marriage whether or no. Leave other considerations to God and to the future. I beseech you, bring it to an end!"

Finlay got up and held out his hand. "I tell you from my heart it is impossible," he said.

"I can't move you?" said Dr Drummond. "Then let us see if the Lord can. You will not object, Finlay, to bring the matter before Him, here and now, in a few words of prayer? I should find it hard to let you go without them."

They went down upon their knees where they stood; and Dr Drummond did little less than order Divine interference; but the prayer that was inaudible was to the opposite purpose.

Ten minutes later the minister himself opened the door to let Finlay out into the night. "You will remember," he said as they shook hands, "that what I think of your position in this matter makes no difference whatever to the question of your aunt's coming here with Miss Cameron when they arrive. You will bring them to this house as a matter of course. I wish you could be guided to a different conclusion but, after all, it is your own conscience that must be satisfied. They will be better here than at the Murchisons'," he added with a last shaft of reproach, "and they will be very welcome."

It said much for Dr Drummond that Finlay was able to fall in with the arrangement. He went back to his boarding-house, and added a postscript embodying it to his letter to Bross. Then he walked out upon the midnight two feverish miles to the town, and posted the letter. The way back was longer and colder.



CHAPTER XXII

"Well, Winter," said Octavius Milburn, "I expect there's business in this for you."

Mr Milburn and Mr Winter had met in the act of unlocking their boxes at the post-office. Elgin had enjoyed postal delivery for several years, but not so much as to induce men of business to abandon the post-office box that had been the great convenience succeeding window inquiry. In time the boxes would go, but the habit of dropping in for your own noonday mail on the way home to dinner was deep-rooted, and undoubtedly you got it earlier. Moreover, it takes time to engender confidence in a postman when he is drawn from your midst, and when you know perfectly well that he would otherwise be driving the mere watering-cart, or delivering the mere ice, as he was last year.

"Looks like it," responded Mr Winter, cheerfully. "The boys have been round as usual. I told them they'd better try another shop this time, but they seemed to think the old reliable was good enough to go on with."

This exchange, to anyone in Elgin, would have been patently simple. On that day there was only one serious topic in Elgin, and there could have been only one reference to business for Walter Winter. The Dominion had come up the day before with the announcement that Mr Robert Farquharson who, for an aggregate of eleven years, had represented the Liberals of South Fox in the Canadian House of Commons, had been compelled under medical advice to withdraw from public life. The news was unexpected, and there was rather a feeling among Mr Farquharson's local support in Elgin that it shouldn't have come from Toronto. It will be gathered that Horace Williams, as he himself acknowledged, was wild. The general feeling, and to some extent Mr Williams's, was appeased by the further information that Mr Farquharson had been obliged to go to Toronto to see a specialist, whose report he had naturally enough taken to party headquarters, whence the Dominion would get it, as Mr Williams said, by telephone or any quicker way there was. Williams, it should be added, was well ahead with the details, as considerate as was consistent with public enterprise, of the retiring member's malady, its duration, the date of the earliest symptoms, and the growth of anxiety in Mrs Farquharson, who had finally insisted—and how right she was!—on the visit to the specialist, upon which she had accompanied Mr Farquharson. He sent round Rawlins. So that Elgin was in possession of all the facts, and Walter Winter, who had every pretension to contest the seat again and every satisfaction that it wouldn't be against Farquharson, might naturally be expected to be taken up with them sufficiently to understand a man who slapped him on the shoulder in the post-office with the remark I have quoted.

"I guess they know what they're about," returned Mr Milburn. "It's a bad knock for the Grits, old Farquharson having to drop out. He's getting up in years, but he's got a great hold here. He'll be a dead loss in votes to his party. I always said our side wouldn't have a chance till the old man was out of the way."

Mr Winter twisted the watch-chain across his protuberant waistcoat, and his chin sank in reflective folds above his neck-tie. Above that again his nose drooped over his moustache, and his eyelids over his eyes, which sought the floor. Altogether he looked sunk, like an overfed bird, in deferential contemplation of what Mr Milburn was saying.

"They've nobody to touch him, certainly in either ability or experience," he replied, looking up to do it, with a handsome air of concession. "Now that Martin's dead, and Jim Fawkes come that howler over Pink River, they'll have their work cut out for them to find a man. I hear Fawkes takes it hard, after all he's done for 'em, not to get the nomination, but they won't hear of it. Quite right, too; he's let too many people in over that concession of his to be popular, even among his friends."

"I suppose he has. Dropped anything there yourself?—No? Nor I. When a thing gets to the boom stage I say let it alone, even if there's gold in it and you've got a School of Mines man to tell you so. Fawkes came out of it at the small end himself, I expect, but that doesn't help him any in the eyes of businessmen."

"I hear," said Walter Winter, stroking his nose, "that old man Parsons has come right over since the bosses at Ottawa have put so much money on preference trade with the old country. He says he was a Liberal once, and may be a Liberal again, but he doesn't see his way to voting to give his customers blankets cheaper than he can make them, and he'll wait till the clouds roll by."