be confessed at once, he and not his message was
her engrossment from the beginning. The message she took with reverent
gentleness; but her passionate interest was for the nature upon which
it travelled, and never for the briefest instant did she confuse these
emotions. Those who write, we are told transcribe themselves in spite
of themselves; it is more true of those who preach, for they are also
candid by profession, and when they are not there is the eye and the
voice to help to betray them. Hugh Finlay, in the pulpit, made himself
manifest in all the things that matter to Advena Murchison in the pew;
and from the pew to the pulpit her love went back with certainty, clear
in its authority and worshipping the ground of its justification. When
she bowed her head it was he whom she heard in the language of his
invocations; his doctrine rode, for her, on a spirit of wide and sweet
philosophy; in his contemplation of the Deity she saw the man. He had
those lips at once mobile, governed and patient, upon which genius
chooses oftenest to rest. As to this, Advena's convictions were so
private as to be hidden from herself; she never admitted that she
thought Finlay had it, and in the supreme difficulty of proving anything
else we may wisely accept her view. But he had something, the subtle
Celt; he had horizons, lifted lines beyond the common vision, and an eye
rapt and a heart intrepid; and though for a long time he was unconscious
of it, he must have adventured there with a happier confidence because
of her companionship.

From the first Advena knew no faltering or fluttering, none of the baser
nervous betrayals. It was all one great delight to her, her discovery
and her knowledge and her love for him. It came to her almost in a
logical development; it found her grave, calm, and receptive. She had
even a private formula of gratitude that the thing which happened to
everybody, and happened to so many people irrelevantly, should arrive
with her in such a glorious defensible, demonstrable sequence. Toward
him it gave her a kind of glad secret advantage; he was loved and he was
unaware. She watched his academic awkwardness in church with the inward
tender smile of the eternal habile feminine, and when they met she could
have laughed and wept over his straightened sentences and his difficult
manner, knowing how little significant they were. With his eyes upon her
and his words offered to her intelligence, she found herself treati