Robert Trenholme was not now merely of the stuff of which men of the
world are made. Could we but know it, a man's mind probably bears to his
religion no very different relation from what his body bears; his creed,
opinions, and sentiments are more nearly allied to what St. Paul calls
"the flesh" than they are to the hidden life of the man, with which God
deals. To the inner spring of Robert Trenholme's life God had access, so
that his creed, and the law of temperance in him, had, not perfection,
but vitality; and the same vitality, now permitted, now refused, by
unseen inlets flowed into all he did and was, and his estimate of things
was changed. He, in subtle selfishness, did much, almost all he could,
to check and interrupt the incoming life, although indeed he prayed, and
often supposed his most ardent desire was, to obtain it. Such is the
average man of faith; such was Robert Trenholme--a better thing, truly,
than a mere man, but not outwardly or inwardly so consistent.

The great fear he had when he opened this letter was that he had caused
his brother to stumble; the great hope, that, because of his prayers,
Heaven would grant it should not be so; but when, on the first hasty
glance over the pages, he discovered that Alec was well, and was
apparently amusing himself in a harmless way, that fear and hope
instantly glided into the background; he hardly knew that they had both
been strong, so faded did they look in the light of the commonplace
certainty.

The next question that pressed assumed an air of paramount importance.
He had asked Alec to enter some honourable mercantile profession. He had
pressed this in the first interview, when the hot-tempered young man had
left him in a rage. He had argued the point in subsequent letters; he
had even offered his own share of their inheritance as additional
capital. He felt that he deserved an answer to this offer, and believed