Finlay, indeed, it may be confessed at once, he and not his message was her engrossment from the beginning.  The message she took with reverent gentleness; but her passionate interest was for the nature upon which it travelled, and never for the briefest instant did she confuse these emotions.  Those who write, we are told transcribe themselves in spite of themselves; it is more true of those who preach, for they are also candid by profession, and when they are not there is the eye and the voice to help to betray them.  Hugh Finlay, in the pulpit, made himself manifest in all the things that matter to Advena Murchison in the pew; and from the pew to the pulpit her love went back with certainty, clear in its authority and worshipping the ground of its justification.  When she bowed her head it was he whom she heard in the language of his invocations; his doctrine rode, for her, on a spirit of wide and sweet philosophy; in his contemplation of the Deity she saw the man.  He had those lips at once mobile, governed and patient, upon which genius chooses oftenest to rest.  As to this, Advena’s convictions were so private as to be hidden from herself; she never admitted that she thought Finlay had it, and in the supreme difficulty of proving anything else we may wisely accept her view.  But he had something, the subtle Celt; he had horizons, lifted lines beyond the common vision, and an eye rapt and a heart intrepid; and though for a long time he was unconscious of it, he must have adventured there with a happier confidence because of her companionship.

From the first Advena knew no faltering or fluttering, none of the baser nervous betrayals.  It was all one great delight to her, her discovery and her knowledge and her love for him.  It came to her almost in a logical development; it found her grave, calm, and receptive.  She had even a private formula of gratitude that the thing which happened to everybody, and happened to so many people irrelevantly, should arrive with her in such a glorious defensible, demonstrable sequence.  Toward him it gave her a kind of glad secret advantage; he was loved and he was unaware.  She watched his academic awkwardness in church with the inward tender smile of the eternal habile feminine, and when they met she could have laughed and wept over his straightened sentences and his difficult manner, knowing how little significant they were.  With his eyes upon her and his words offered to her intelligence, she found herself treating his shy formality as the convention it was, a kind of make-believe which she would politely and kindly play up to until he should happily forget it and they could enter upon simpler relations.  She had to play up to it for a long time, but her love made her wonderfully clever and patient; and of course the day came when she had her reward.  Knowing him as she did, she remembered the day and the difference it made.