During the years of his widowhood Mr. Meredith had received innumerable hints from brother members of Presbytery and from many parishioners who could not be suspected of any ulterior motive, as well as from some who could, that he ought to marry again:  But these hints never made any impression on him.  It was commonly thought he was never aware of them.  But he was quite acutely aware of them.  And in his own occasional visitations of common sense he knew that the common sensible thing for him to do was to marry.  But common sense was not the strong point of John Meredith, and to choose out, deliberately and cold-bloodedly, some “suitable” woman, as one might choose a housekeeper or a business partner, was something he was quite incapable of doing.  How he hated that word “suitable.”  It reminded him so strongly of James Perry.  “A suit able woman of suit able age,” that unctuous brother of the cloth had said, in his far from subtle hint.  For the moment John Meredith had had a perfectly unbelievable desire to rush madly away and propose marriage to the youngest, most unsuitable woman it was possible to discover.

Mrs. Marshall Elliott was his good friend and he liked her.  But when she had bluntly told him he should marry again he felt as if she had torn away the veil that hung before some sacred shrine of his innermost life, and he had been more or less afraid of her ever since.  He knew there were women in his congregation “of suitable age” who would marry him quite readily.  That fact had seeped through all his abstraction very early in his ministry in Glen St. Mary.  They were good, substantial, uninteresting women, one or two fairly comely, the others not exactly so and John Meredith would as soon have thought of marrying any one of them as of hanging himself.  He had some ideals to which no seeming necessity could make him false.  He could ask no woman to fill Cecilia’s place in his home unless he could offer her at least some of the affection and homage he had given to his girlish bride.  And where, in his limited feminine acquaintance, was such a woman to be found?

Rosemary West had come into his life on that autumn evening bringing with her an atmosphere in which his spirit recognized native air.  Across the gulf of strangerhood they clasped hands of friendship.  He knew her better in that ten minutes by the hidden spring than he knew Emmeline Drew or Elizabeth Kirk or Amy Annetta Douglas in a year, or could know them, in a century.  He had fled to her for comfort when Mrs. Alec Davis had outraged his mind and soul and had found it.  Since then he had gone often to the house on the hill, slipping through the shadowy paths of night in Rainbow Valley so astutely that Glen gossip could never be absolutely certain that he did go to see Rosemary West.  Once or twice he had been caught in the West living room by other visitors; that was all the Ladies’ Aid had to go by.  But when Elizabeth Kirk heard