“But, Mr. Welsh,” said Ralph eagerly, with some sympathy in his voice, “why should you trouble yourself about this story now—­or I, for the matter of that?  I can understand that Winsome Charteris has somehow to do with it, and that the knowledge has come to you in the course of your duty; but even if, at any future time, Winsome Charteris were aught to me or I to her—­the which I have at present only too little hope of—­her forbears, be they whomsoever they might, were no more to me than Julius Caesar.  I have seen her and looked into her eyes.  What needs she of ancestors that is kin to the angels?”

Something like pity came into the minister’s stern eyes as he listened to the lad.  Once he had spoken just such wild, heart-eager words.

“I will answer you in a sentence,” he said.  “I that speak with you am the cause.  I am he that has preached law and the gospel—­for twenty years covering my sin with the Pharisee’s strictness of observance.  I am he that was false friend but never false lover—­ that married without kirk or blessing.  I am the man that clasped a dead woman’s hand whom I never owned as wife, and watched afar off the babe that I never dared to call mine own.  I am the father of Winifred Oharteris, coward before man, castaway before God.  Of my sin two know besides my Maker—­the father that begot you, whose false friend I was in the days that were, and Walter Skirving, the father of the first Winifred whose eyes this hand closed under the Peacock tree at Crossthwaite.”

The broad drops fell on the window-panes in splashes, and the thunder rain drummed on the roof.

The minister rose and went out, leaving Ralph Peden sitting in the dark with the universe in ruins about him.  The universe is fragile at twenty-one.

And overhead the great drops fell from the brooding thunder-clouds, and in the wainscoting of Allan Welsh’s study the death-watch ticked.

CHAPTER XXXII.

Outcast and alien from the commonwealth.

“Moreover,” said the minister—­coming in an hour afterwards to take up the interrupted discussion—­“the kirk of the Marrow overrides all considerations of affection or self-interest.  If you are to enter the Marrow kirk, you must live for the Marrow, and fight for the Marrow, and, above all, you must wed for the Marrow—­”

“As you did, no doubt,” said Ralph, somewhat ungenerously.

Ralph had remained sitting in the study where the minister had left him.

“No, for myself,” said the minister, with a certain firmness and high civility, which made the young man ashamed of himself, “I am no true son of the Marrow.  I have indeed served the Marrow kirk in her true and only protesting section for twenty-five years; but I am only kept in my position by the good grace of two men—­of your father and of Walter Skirving.  And do not think that they keep