gus, if I can forgive him, you can, for you are dearer to me than
to anybody else." Her hands were now upon his head:--"Angus Strachan, I
ordain you to suffer and to wait. I ordain you to God's service in the
name of love and sorrow and God--and they're all the same name--and I
love you so--and you are an elder now. Oh, dear Lord, take care of our
love and make us true--and patient. And bless our sorrow and make it
sweet and keep us near the Man of Sorrows. Amen."

The white dimpled hands rested long upon the auburn locks of the still
bended head, and her compassion flowed through them to the more than
orphaned heart. It was the same head, she thought, and the same heart,
as had once been blessed by a mother's anguished hand, doomed, as that
mother knew, to the world's unreasoning scorn.

Her own peace seemed to pass into his troubled soul; the anointed head
bowed lower and the yoke was laid upon him, never to be withdrawn. But
its bitterness was gone, purged from it by those white dimpled hands,
and the fragrance of a soul's sweeter life was there instead. For there
had come to him that great moment when secret rebellion turns to secret
prayer, craving blessing from the very hand that had smitten him with
lameness; and Angus was making his ordination vows to God.

Upon that grassy knoll, under heaven's tender sky, with unmoving lips
and broken heart he made the great surrender. Patience he promised God;
and in return he begged the forgiving heart, the strength to bear his
lifelong load, and the aid which might enable him to attain that miracle
of grace when he yet should pray for the man whose sin had foreclothed
his life in shame.

"Let us go back," said Margaret, at length, for the sun was westering.

"Yes, we will go back," said he, for in the gentle words he heard the
bugle call; "we will go back." But first he kissed the ordaining hands,
anointed as they had been to cast out evil from the heart and to bind up
its brokenness.

Homeward they turned their steps, and the noises of the uncaring world
soon fell upon their ears, but their hearts were holden of another song,
and they heard them not.

Backward they bent their way to the world and its cruel pity--but ever
hand in hand.

* * * * *

As the reader already knows, Margaret and Angus went forth from St.
Cuthbert's Church just as Michael Blake was invited to speak in his own
defense and to answer, if he might, the dread cha