d many a good
hard look I used to give them while I was preaching. Knox Church was a
different place then. The choir sat in the back gallery, and we had a
precentor, a fine fellow--he lost an arm at Ridgway in the Fenian raid.
Well I mind him and the frown he would put on when he took up the fork.
But, for that matter, every man Jack in the choir had a frown on in the
singing, though the bass fellows would be the fiercest. We've been twice
enlarged since, and the organist has long been a salaried professional.
But I doubt whether the praise of God is any heartier than it was when
it followed Peter Craig's tuning-fork. Aye. You'd always hear John
Murchison's note in the finish."

Finlay was listening with the look of a charmed animal. Dr Drummond's
voice was never more vibrant, more moving, more compelling than when he
called up the past; and here to Finlay the past was itself enchanted.

"She always had those wonderful dark eyes. She's pale enough now, but
as a child she was rosy. Taking her place of a winter evening, with the
snow on her fur cap and her hair, I often thought her a picture. I liked
to have her attention while I was preaching, even as a child; and when
she was absent I missed her. It was through my ministrations that she
saw her way to professing the Church of Christ, and under my heartfelt
benediction that she first broke bread in her Father's house. I hold the
girl in great affection, Finlay; and I grieve to hear this."

The other drew a long breath, and his hand tightened on the arm of his
chair. He was, as we know, blind to many of the world's aspects, even to
those in which he himself figured; and Dr Drummond's plain hypothesis of
his relations with Advena came before him in forced illumination, flash
by tragic flash. This kind of revelation is more discomforting than
darkness, since it carries the surprise of assault, and Finlay groped in
it, helpless and silent.

"You are grieved, sir?" he said mechanically.

"Man, she loves you!" exclaimed the Doctor, in a tone that would no
longer forbear.

Hugh Finlay seemed to take the words just where they were levelled, in
his breast. He half leaped from his chair; the lower part of his face
had the rigidity of iron.

"I am not obliged to discuss such a matter as that," he said hoarsely,
"with you or with any man."

He looked confusedly about him for his hat, which he had left in the
hall; and Dr Drummond profited by the instant. He stepped across a