e the name of John
Macrae so famous that you will need no such advertising."

"What do you mean, Bishop?"

"I want you to go to the trenches at Redan or to fight your way into
Sebastopol. You have been left too much to your own direction and your
own way. Obedience is the first round of the ladder of Success. You
must learn it. You can only be a subordinate till you manage this
lesson. Your ideas of life are crude and provincial. You need to see
men making their way upward, in some other places than in shops and
offices. Above all, you must learn to conquer yourself and your
indiscreet will. You are not a man, until you are master in your own
house and fear no mutiny against your Will to act nobly. You have had
no opportunities for such education. Now take one year to begin it."

"You mean that I must put off my marriage for a year."

"Exactly. Under present circumstances----"

"Oh, sir, that is not thinkable! It would be too mortifying! I could
not go back to Edinburgh. I could not put off my marriage!"

"You will be obliged to do so. Do you imagine the Ragnors will hold
wedding festivities, while their eldest son is dying, or his broken
body on its way home for burial?"

"I thought the ceremony would be entirely religious and the
festivities could be abandoned."

"Is that what you wish?"

"Yes, Bishop."

"Then you will not get it. A year's strict mourning is due the dead,
and the Ragnors will give every hour of it. Boris is their eldest
son."

"They should remember also their living daughter Thora will suffer as
well as myself."

"You are not putting yourself in a good light, John Macrae. Thora
loves her brother with a great affection. Do you think she can comfort
her grief for his loss, by giving you any loving honour that belongs
to him? You do not know Thora Ragnor. She has her mother's just,
strong character below all her gentle ways, and what her father and
mother say she will endorse, without question or reluctance. Now I
know that Ragnor had resolved on a year's separation and discipline,
before he heard of his son's dangerous condition."

"Boris was not dead when that Vedder letter was written. He may not be
dead now. He may not be going to die."

"It is only his wonderful physical strength that has kept him alive so
long. Vedder said to me, they looked for his death at any hour. He
cannot recover. His wound is a fatal one. It is beyond hope. Vedder
wrote while he was yet alive, so that he m