The Imperialist

uld have been justly considered absurd, and nobody pronounced it. The church was full, as Mrs Forsyth observed, on these occasions; b

conjuring a vacation congregation for his young substitute. They came trooping, old and young. Mr and Mrs Murchison would survey their creditable family rank with a secret compunction, remembering its invariable gaps at other times, and then resolutely turn to the praise of God with the reflection that one means to righteousness was as blessed as another. They themselves never missed a Sunday, and as seldom failed to remark on the way back that it was all very interesting, but Mr Finlay couldn't drive it home like the Doctor. There were times, sparse and special occasions, when the Doctor himself made one of the congregation. Then he would lean back luxuriously in the corner of his own pew, his wiry little form half-lost in the upholstery his arms folded, his knees crossed, his face all humorous indulgence; yes, humorous. At the announcement of th

rse?" The celebrated among such persons he pursued to their deathbeds; Voltaire and Rousseau owed their reputation, with many persons in Knox Church, to their last moments and to Dr Drummond. He had a triumphant invective which drew the mind from chasms in logic, and a tender sense of poetic beauty which drew it, when he quoted great lines, from everything else. He loved the euphony of the Old Testament; his sonorous delivery would lift a chapter from Isaiah to the height of ritual, and every Psalm he read was a Magnificat whether he would or no. The warrior in him was happy among the Princes of Issachar; and the parallels he would find for modern events in the annals of Judah and of Israel were astounding. Yet he kept a sharp eye upon the daily paper, and his reference to current events would often give his listeners an audacious sense of up-to-dateness which might have be

assemblies

gregati

ing; you were compelled by his natural force and his unqual

the simple motive and the noble intention, the detached point of view and the somewhat indifferent attitude to material things, as it may be humanly featured anywhere. His face bore a confusion of ideals; he had the brow of a Covenanter and the mouth of Adonais, the flame of religious ardour in his eyes and the composure of perceived philosophy on his lips. He was fettered by an impenetrable shyness; it was in the pulpit alone that he could expand, and then only upon written lines, with hardly a gesture, and th

sed in by novelists; and Advena noted with delight the ingenuity of fate in casting such a person into the pulpit of the Presbyterian Church in a young country. She ha

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 whic

s 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 intellige

s to his act, or some freshness in her voice stayed him. At all events, he waited and joined her, with a word or two about their going in the same direction; and they walked along together. He offered her his companionship, but he had nothing to say; the silence in which they pursued their way was no doubt to him just the embarrassing condition he usually had to contend with. To her it seemed pregnant, auspicious; it drew something from the low grey lights of the wet spring afterno

something to be in a country where the sun st

s," she replied. "I've always longed to see a sunse

r themselves, sunsets?" he asked,

n, But I was angry in my heart," she

it go on

an act of violence, isn't it, a sunset? Something taken from us against our will. It's a hateful

lves till it is over. So much cut off and ended it is," he said, glancing at the sky again. "

aid Advena, "

time?" he suggested, s

the future," she an

e future, at any rate," he returned. "The world is

ber that," she

d outright. "I haven't thoug

hing," she ventured gaily,

good deal more snow on each side of it. They lingered together for a moment talking, seizing the new joy in it which was simply the joy of his s

d. "There IS pain over there. One thinks a sunset beau

was still snowbound, while she went on into the chilly yellow