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.

Ralph Peden had come out into the morning air, with his note-book and a volume which he had been studying all the way from Edinburgh.  As he lay at length among the grass he conned it over and over.  He referred to passages here and there.  He set out very calmly with that kind of determination with which a day’s work in the open air with a book is often begun.  Not for a moment did he break the monotony of his study.  The marshalled columns of strange letters were mowed down before him.

A great humble-bee, barred with tawny orange, worked his way up from his hole in the bank, buzzing shrilly in an impatient, stifled manner at finding his dwelling blocked as to its exit by a mountainous bulk.  Ralph Peden rose in a hurry.  The beast seemed to be inside his coat.  He had instinctively hated bees and everything that buzzed ever since as a child he had made experiments with the paper nest of a tree-building wasp.  The humble-bee buzzed a little more, discontentedly, thought of going back, crept out at last from beneath the Hebrew Lexicon, and appeared to comb his hair with his feeler.  Then he slowly mounted along the broad blade of a meadow fox-tail grass, which bent under him as if to afford him an elastic send-off upon his flight.  With a spring he lumbered up, taking his way over the single field which separated his house from the edge of the Grannoch water—­where on the other side, above the glistening sickle-sweep of sand which looked so inviting, yet untouched under the pines by the morning sun, the hyacinths lay like a blue wreath of peat smoke in the hollows of the wood.

But there was a whiff of real peat smoke somewhere in the air, and Ralph Peden, before he returned to his book, was aware of the murmur of voices.  He moved away from the humble-bee’s dwelling and established himself on a quieter slope under a bush of broom.  A whin-chat said “check, check” above him, and flirted a brilliant tail; but Ralph Peden was not afraid of whin-chats.  Here he settled himself to study, knitting his brows and drumming on the ground with the toe of one foot to concentrate his attention.  The whin-chat could