comfort and to repay the anxiety of
their early days, then a wretched little huzzy steps in and makes one's
life in vain."

"Just so, my dear," said Dr. Corfield quietly. "These were the identical
words which my mother said to me when I told her I was going to marry
you."

"Your mother never liked me, and I did like Leam," said Mrs. Corfield
tartly.

"As Leam Dundas, maybe; but as Leam the wife of your son, I doubt it."

"If Alick had liked it--" said Mrs. Corfield, half in tears.

"You would have been jealous," returned her husband. "No: all girls are
only daughters of Heth to the mothers of Jacobs, and I never knew one
whom a mother thought good enough for her boy."

"You need not discredit your own flesh and blood for a stranger," cried
Mrs. Corfield crossly; and the mute man with an aggravating smile
suddenly seemed to repent of his unusual loquacity, and gradually
subsided into himself and his calculations, from which he was so rarely
aroused.

Alick, ceasing to make a confidante of his mother, began to make a
friend of Mr. Gryce. Perhaps it ought rather to be said that Mr. Gryce
began to make a friend of him. The old philosopher, with that corkscrew
mind of his, knew well enough what was amiss with the poor lank-visaged
curate. Being of the order of the benevolent busybodies fond of playing
Providence, how mole-like soever his method, he had marked out a little
plan of his own by which he thought he could make all the crooked roads
run straight and discord flow into harmony. But he too fell into the
mistake common to busybodies, benevolent and otherwise--treating souls
as if they were machines to be wound up and kept going by the clockwork
of an extraneous will and neatly manipulated by well-arranged
circumstance.

One day he joined Alick in his walk to an outlying cottage of the
parish, where the husband was sick and the wife and children short of
food, and the Church sent its prayer-book and ministers as the best
substitute it knew for a wholesome dwelling and sufficient wages.
Theology was not much in the way of an old heathen who reduced all
religions save Mohammedanism to the transmuted presentation of the
archaic solar myth, and who thought Buddhism far ahead of every other
creed; but he liked the man Alick, if the parson bored him, and he was
caressing a plan which he had in his pocket.

"You find your life here satisfying, I suppose?" he began, his blue eyes
looking into the wayside banks for