Scripture character of the truly good woman of the Proverbs, with
which you were engaged on your first coming here?"

"I have not quite finished," said Ralph, looking a little
strangely at the minister.

"You ought always to finish one subject before you begin another,"
said Mr. Welsh, with a certain slow sententiousness.

By-and-bye Ralph got away from the table, and in the silence of
his own room gave himself to a repentant and self-accusing day of
study. Remorsefully sad, with many searchings of heart, he
questioned whether indeed he were fit for the high office of
minister in the kirk of the Marrow; whether he could now accept
that narrow creed, and take up alone the burden of these manifold
protestings. It was for this that he had been educated; it was for
this that he had been given his place at his father's desk since
ever he could remember.

Here he had studied in the far-off days of his boyhood strange
deep books, the flavour of which only he retained. He had learned
his letters out of the Bible--the Old Testament. He had gone
through the Psalms from beginning to end before he was six. He
remembered that the paraphrases were torn out of all the Bibles in
the manse. Indeed, they existed only in a rudimentary form even in
the great Bible in the kirk (in which by some oversight a heathen
binder had bound them), but Allan Welsh had rectified this by
pasting them up, so that no preacher in a moment of demoniac
possession might give one out. What would have happened if this
had occurred in the Marrow kirk it is perhaps better only