CHAPTER I.

The blanket-washing.

Ralph Peden lay well content under a thorn bush above the Grannoch water.  It was the second day of his sojourning in Galloway—­the first of his breathing the heather scent on which the bees grew tipsy, and of listening to the grasshoppers chirring in the long bent by the loch side.  Yesterday his father’s friend, Allan Welsh, minister of the Marrow kirk in the parish of Dullarg, had held high discourse with him as to his soul’s health, and made many inquiries as to how it sped in the great city with the precarious handful of pious folk, who gathered to listen to the precious and savoury truths of the pure Marrow teaching.  Ralph Peden was charged with many messages from his father, the metropolitan Marrow minister, to Allan Welsh—­dear to his soul as the only minister who had upheld the essentials on that great day, when among the assembled Presbyters so many had gone backward and walked no more with him.

“Be faithful with the young man, my son,” Allan Welsh read in the quaintly sealed and delicately written letter which his brother minister in Edinburgh had sent to him, and which Ralph had duly delivered in the square, grim manse of Dullarg, with a sedate and old-fashioned reverence which sat strangely on one of his years.  “Be faithful with the young man,” continued the letter; “he is well grounded on the fundamentals; his head is filled with godly lear, and he has sound views on the Headship; but he has always been a little cold and distant even to me, his father according to the flesh.  With his companions he is apt to be distant and reserved.  I am to blame for the solitude of our life here in James’s Court, but to you I do not need to tell the reason of that.  The Lord give you his guidance in leading the young man in the right way.”

So far Gilbert Peden’s letter had run staidly and in character like the spoken words of the writer.  But here it broke off.  The writing, hitherto fine as a hair, thickened; and from this point became crowded and difficult, as though the floods of feeling had broken some dam.  “O man Allan, for my sake, if at all you have loved me, or owe me anything, dig deep and see if the lad has a 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.