The rector of St Blank's, the fashionable edifice where the ladies of
the Cheney household obtained spiritual manna in New York, died when
Alice was sixteen years old. He was a good old man, and a sincere
Episcopalian, and whatever originality of thought or expression he
may have lacked, his strict observance of the High Church code of
ethics maintained the tone of his church and rendered him an object
of reverence to his congregation. His successor was Reverend Arthur
Emerson Stuart, a young man barely thirty years of age, heir to a
comfortable fortune, gifted with strong intellectual powers and
dowered with physical attractions.

It was not a case of natural selection which caused Arthur Stuart to
adopt the church as a profession. It was the result of his middle
name. Mrs Stuart had been an Emerson--in some remote way her family
claimed relationship with Ralph Waldo. Her father and grandfather
and several uncles had been clergymen. She married a broker, who
left her a rich widow with one child, a son. From the hour this son
was born his mother designed him for the clergy, and brought him up
with the idea firmly while gently fixed in his mind.

Whatever seed a mother plants in a young child's mind, carefully
watches over, prunes and waters, and exposes to sun and shade, is
quite certain to grow, if the soil is not wholly stony ground.

Arthur Stuart adored his mother, and stifling some commercial
instincts inherited from the parental side, he turned his attention
to the ministry and entered upon his chosen work when only twenty-
five years of age. Eloquent, dramatic in speech, handsome, and
magnetic in person, independent in fortune, and of excellent lineage