In his boyhood the priests had been great friends of Bruce McKenzie.  While of a different faith, he had listened eagerly to the things they had to tell him, these wise men, the pioneers of missionary work in many lands, teachers and scholars.  His imagination had been fired by their tales of devotion, and he had many arguments with his Covenanter grandfather, to whom the gold cross on the top of the college had been the sign and symbol of papacy.

“But, grandfather, the things we believe aren’t so very different, and I like to pray in their chapel.”

“Why not pray in your own kirk?”

“It’s so bare.”

“There’s nothing to distract your thoughts.”

“And I like the singing, and the lights and the candles—­”

“We need no candles; we have light enough in our souls.”

But Bruce had loved the smell of the incense, and the purple and red of the robes, and, seeing it all through the golden haze of the lights, his sense of beauty had been satisfied, as it was not satisfied in his own plain house of worship.

Yet it had been characteristic of the boy as it was of the man that neither kirk nor chapel held him, and he had gone through life liking each a little, but neither overmuch.

Something of this he tried to express to Jean as, arriving at Woodstock in the early afternoon, they passed the College.  “I might have been a priest,” he said, “if I hadn’t been too much of a Puritan or a Pagan.  I am not sure which held me back—­”

Jean shuddered.  “How can people shut themselves away from the world?”

“They have a world of their own, my dear,” said the Doctor, thoughtfully, “and I’m not sure that it isn’t as interesting as our own.”

“But there isn’t love in it,” said Jean.

“There’s love that carries them above self—­and that’s something.”

“It is something, but it isn’t much,” said his small daughter, obstinately.  “I don’t want to love the world, Daddy.  I want to love Derry—­”

The Doctor groaned.  “I thought I had escaped him, for a day.”

“You will never escape him,” was the merciless rejoinder, but she kissed him to make up for it.

In spite of the fact of her separation for the moment from her lover, she had enjoyed the ride.  There had been much wind, and a little snow on the way.  But now the air was clear, with a sort of silver clearness—­the frozen river was gray-green between its banks, there were blue shadows flung by the bare trees.  As they passed the College, a few black-frocked fathers and scholastics paced the gardens.

Jean wished that Derry were there to see it all.  It was to her a place of many memories.  Most of the summers of her little girlhood had been spent there, with now and then a Christmas holiday.

The house did not boast a heating plant, but there were roaring open fires in all the rooms, except in the Connollys’ sitting room, which was warmed by a great black stove.