erally adored.

"As for Clarrie," he said at last, "she puts me in an awkward position.
How do I know that I love her?"

"You have known each other a long time," said the minister.

His guest was cleaning his pipe with a hair-pin, that his quick eye had
detected on the carpet.

"And she is devoted to you," continued Mr. Eassie.

The young man nodded.

"What I fear," he said, "is that we have known each other too long.
Perhaps my feeling for Clarrie is only brotherly--"

"Hers for you, Andrew, is more than sisterly."

"Admitted. But consider, Mr. Eassie, she has only seen the world in
soirees. Every girl has her day-dreams, and Clarrie has perhaps made a
dream of me. She is impulsive, given to idealisation, and hopelessly
illogical."

The minister moved uneasily in his chair.

"I have reasoned out her present relation to me," the young man went
on, "and, the more you reduce it to the usual formulae, the more
illogical it becomes. Clarrie could possibly describe me, but define
me--never. What is our prospect of happiness in these circumstances?"

"But love--" began Mr. Eassie.

"Love!" exclaimed Andrew. "Is there such a thing? Reduce it to
syllogistic form, and how does it look in Barbara?"

For the moment there was almost some expression in his face, and he
suffered from a determination of words to the mouth.

"Love and logic," Mr. Eassie interposed, "are hardly kindred studies."

"Is love a study at all?" asked Andrew, bitterly. "It is but the trail
of idleness. But all idleness is folly; therefore, love is folly."

Mr. Eassie was not so keen a logician as his guest, but he had age for
a major premiss. He was easy-going rather than a coward; a preacher
who, in the pulpit, looked difficulties genially in the face, and
passed them by.

Riach had a very long neck. He was twenty-five years of age, fair, and
somewhat heavily built, with a face as inexpressive as book-covers.

A native of Wheens and an orphan, he had been brought up by his uncle,
who was a weaver and read Herodotus in the original. The uncle starved
himself to buy books and talk about them, until one day he got a good
meal, and died of it. Then Andrew apprenticed himself to a tailor.

When his time was out, he walked fifty miles to Aberdeen University,
and got a bursary. He had been there a month, when his professor said
good-naturedly--

"Don't you think, Mr. Riach, you would get on better if you took your
hands out of