The note of irritation in his voice puzzled her.  “I think the form is commoner with us,” she said, “even among men who know each other fairly well.”  Her secret glance flashed over the gulf that nevertheless divided Finlay and her brother, that would always divide them.  She saw it with something like pain, which struggled through her pride in both.  “And then, you know—­your calling—­”

“I suppose it is that,” he replied, ill content.

“I’ve noticed Dr Drummond’s way,” she told him, with rising spirits.  “It’s delightful.  He drops the ‘Mr’ with fellow-ministers of his own denomination only—­never with Wesleyans or Baptists, for a moment.  He always comes back very genial from the General Assembly, and full of stories.  ‘I said to Grant,’ or ’Macdonald said to me’—­and he always calls you ‘Finlay,’” she added shyly.  “By the way, I suppose you know he’s to be the new Moderator?”

“Is he, indeed?  Yes—­yes, of course, I knew!  We couldn’t have a better.”

They walked on through the early autumn night.  It was just not raining.  The damp air was cool and pungent with the smell of fallen leaves, which lay thick under their feet.  Advena speared the dropped horse chestnut husks with the point of her umbrella as they went along.  She had picked up half a dozen when he spoke again.  “I want to tell you—­I have to tell you—­something—­about myself, Miss Murchison.”

“I should like,” said Advena steadily, “to hear.”

“It is a matter that has, I am ashamed to confess, curiously gone out of my mind of late—­I should say until lately.  There was little until lately—­I am so poor a letter writer—­to remind me of it.  I am engaged to be married!”

“But how interesting!” exclaimed Advena.

He looked at her taken aback.  His own mood was heavy; it failed to answer this lightness from her.  It is hard to know what he expected, what his unconscious blood expected for him; but it was not this.  If he had little wisdom about the hearts of women, he had less about their behaviour.  She said nothing more, but inclined her head in an angle of deference and expectation toward what he should further communicate.

“I don’t know that I have ever told you much about my life in Scotland,” he went on.  “It has always seemed to me so remote and—­disconnected with everything here.  I could not suppose it would interest anyone.  I was cared for and educated by my father’s only sister, a good woman.  It was as if she had whole charge of the part of my life that was not absorbed in work.  I don’t know that I can make you understand.  She was identified with all the rest—­I left it to her.  Shortly before I sailed for Canada she spoke to me of marriage in connection with my work and—­welfare, and with—­a niece of her husband’s who was staying with us at the time, a person suitable in every way.  Apart from my aunt, I do not know—­However, I owed everything to her, and I—­took her advice in the matter.  I left it to her.  She is a managing woman; but she can nearly always prove herself right.  Her mind ran a great deal, a little too much perhaps, upon creature comforts, and I suppose she thought that in emigrating a man might do well to companion himself.”