the foot.
On a beautifully inlaid table in the centre of the room was an
unfinished water-colour drawing, propped up by a pile of richly gilded
and ornamented books. The drawing, with its support, had been pushed
back towards the middle of the table, to make way for a sheet or two of
note-paper containing portions of a projected poem. And the presiding
and inspiring genius of all this beautiful confusion was Agnes Prosser.

And did she make her husband happy? Well, it was taken for granted by
friends and acquaintance that she did--or, at any rate, that it must be
_his_ fault if she did not; and so the poor doctor thought himself. He
was proud of his wife, and considered that he ought to be thoroughly
happy with her; but somehow or other, he was not so. She was, in the
common acceptation of the words, highly accomplished, of an amiable and
loving disposition, graceful and winning in person and manner, able to
take the head of his table to the entire satisfaction of himself and his
friends, and capable of conversing well on every subject with all who
were invited to her house, or whom she met in society elsewhere.

What could her husband want more? He _did_ want something more--his
heart asked and yearned for something more. What was it? He could
hardly distinctly tell. Nevertheless he felt himself on this
afternoon--he had been gradually approaching the feeling for some time
past--a disappointed man. Perhaps it was his own fault, he thought; yet
so it was.

He was now just forty years of age, and had been married three years.
His wife was some ten years younger than himself. He had looked well
round him before making choice of one with whom he was to share the joys
and sorrows of a domestic life. He was a man who thoroughly respected
religion, and could well discriminate between the genuine servant of
Christ and the mere sounding professor, while at the same time
scientific studies had rather tended to make him undervalue clear
dogmatic teaching as set forth in the revealed Word of God. Yet he was
too profound a thinker to adopt that popular scepticism which is either
the refuge of those who, consciously or unconsciously, use it as a
screen, though it proves but a semi-transparent one at the best, to shut
out the light of a coming judgment, or the halting-place of thinkers who
stop short of the only source of true and infallible wisdom--the
revealed mind of God. His wife, too, had been taught religiously