urged me to risk speaking of my son in her presence once more, on
the chance of making her betray herself on a second occasion, and I
determined to take his advice. But she was in such high spirits when she
came home to dinner on this Seventh Day, and seemed so incapable, for
the time being, of either feeling or speaking seriously, that I thought
it wiser to wait till her variable mood altered again with the next wet
day.

The number drawn this evening was Eight, being the number of the story
which it had cost Owen so much labor to write. He looked a little
fluttered and anxious as he opened the manuscript. This was the first
occasion on which his ability as a narrator was to be brought to the
test, and I saw him glance nervously at Jessie's attentive face.

"I need not trouble you with much in the way of preface," he said. "This
is the story of a very remarkable event in the life of one of my brother
clergymen. He and I became acquainted through being associated with each
other in the management of a Missionary Society. I saw him for the last
time in London when he was about to leave his country and his friends
forever, and was then informed of the circumstances which have afforded
the material for this narrative."

BROTHER OWEN'S STORY of THE PARSON'S SCRUPLE.

CHAPTER I.

IF you had been in the far West of England about thirteen years since,
and if you had happened to take up one of the Cornish newspapers on a
certain day of the month, which need not be specially mentioned, you
would have seen this notice of a marriage at the top of a column:

On the third instant, at the parish church, the Reverend Alfred Carling,
Rector of Penliddy, to Emily Harriet, relict of the late Fergus Duncan,
Esq., of Glendarn, N. B.

The rector's marriage did not produce a very favorable impression in
the town, solely in consequence of the unaccountable private and
unpretending manner in which the ceremony had been performed. The
middle-aged bride and bridegroom had walked quietly to church one
morning, had been married by the curate before any one was aware of it,
and had embarked immediately afterward in the steamer for Tenby, where
they proposed to pass their honeymoon. The bride being a stranger at
Penliddy, all inquiries about her previous history were fruitless,
and the townspeople had no alternative but to trust to their own
investigations for enlightenment when the rector and his wife came home
to settle am