heart. He shews it not to me."

So that is why Ralph Peden lies couched in the sparce bells of the
ling, just where the dry, twisted timothy grasses are beginning to
overcrown the purple bells of the heather. Tall and clean-limbed,
with a student's pallor of clear-cut face, a slightly ascetic
stoop, dark brown curls clustering over a white forehead, and eyes
which looked steadfast and true, the young man was sufficient of a
hero. He wore a broad straw hat, which he had a pleasant habit of
pushing back, so that his clustering locks fell over his brow
after a fashion which all women thought becoming. But Ralph Peden
heeded not what women thought, said, or did, for he was trysted to
the kirk of the Marrow, the sole repertory of orthodox truth in
Scotland, which is as good as saying in the wide world--perhaps
even in the universe.

Ralph Peden had dwelt all his life with his father in an old house
in James's Court, Edinburgh, overlooking the great bounding circle
of the northern horizon and the eastern sea. He had been trained
by his father to think more of a professor's opinion on his Hebrew
exercise than of a woman's opinion on any subject whatever. He had
been told that women were an indispensable part of the economy of
creation; but, though he accepted word by word the Westminster
Confession, and as an inexorable addition the confessions and
protests of the remnant of the true kirk in Scotland (known as the
Marrow kirk), he could not but consider woman a poor makeshift,
even as providing for the continuity of the race. Surely she had
not been created when God looked upon all that he had made and
found it very good. The thought preserved Ralph's orthodoxy.