reary autumn morning, she repeated it as part
of her tearful prayer, entreating for wisdom and strength to keep the
vow she vowed, that whatever changes or disappointments or sorrows might
darken her brother's future, he should find her love and trust unchanged
for ever.

CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT.

Arthur Elliott was a young man of good intellect and superior
acquirements, and he had ever been supposed to possess an average amount
of penetration, and of that invaluable quality not always found in
connection with superior intellect--common sense. He remembered his
mother, and worshipped her memory. She had been a wise and
earnest-minded woman, and one of God's saints besides. Living for years
in daily intercourse with his sister Graeme, he had learnt to admire in
her the qualities that made her a daughter worthy of such a mother. Yet
in the choice of one who was to be "till death did them part" more than
sister and mother in one, the qualities which in them were his pride and
delight, were made of no account. Flesh of his flesh, the keeper of his
honour and his peace henceforth, the maker or marrer of his life's
happiness, be it long or short, was this pretty unformed, wayward child.

One who has made good use of long opportunity for observation, tells me
that Arthur Elliott's is by no means a singular case. Quite as often as
otherwise, men of high intellectual and moral qualities link their lot
with women who are far inferior to them in these respects; and not
always unhappily. If, as sometimes happens, a woman lets her heart slip
from her into the keeping of a man who is intellectually or morally her
inferior, happiness is far more rarely the result. A woman, may, with
such help as comes to her by chance, keep her _solitary_ way through
life content. But if love and marriage, or the ties of blood, have
given her an arm on which she has a right to lean, a soul on whose
guidance she has a right to trust, it is sad indeed if these fail her.
For then she has no right to walk alone, no power to do so happily. Her
intellectual and social life must grow together, or one must grow awry.
What God has joined cannot be put asunder without suffering or loss.

But it _is_ possible for a man to separate his intellectual life from
the quiet routine of social duties and pleasures. It is not always
necessary that he should have the sympathy of his housekeeper, or even
of the mother of his children, in those higher pursuit