"Pardon me, Agnes," he said. "I was calling on the deaf old gentleman up-stairs, and perceiving that devotions were being conducted here, stopped that I might not interrupt them." Calvin's commonplace nature had hardly been dazed by Agnes's prayer. He was only confirmed in the idea that she was a woman of genius, and would take half the work of a pastor off his hands. In the light of both desire and convenience she had, therefore, appreciated in his eyes. To marry her, become the proprietor of her snug home and ravishing person, and send her off to pray with the sick and sup with the older women of the flock, seemed to him such a comfortable consummation as to have Heaven's especial approval. Thus do we deceive ourselves when the spirit of God has departed from us, even in youth, and construe our dreams of selfishness to be glimmerings of a purer life. Calvin was precocious in assurance, because, in addition to being unprincipled, he was in a manner ordained by election and birthright to rule over Kensington. His father had been one of those strong-willed, clear-visioned, intelligent young Eastern divinity students who brought to a place of more voluptuous and easy burgher society the secular vigor of New England pastors. Being always superior and always sincere, his rule had been ungrumblingly accepted. Another generation, at middle age, found him over them as he had been over their parents--a righteous, intrepid Protestant priest, good at denunciation, counsel, humor, or sympathy. The elders and deacons never thought of objecting to anything after he had insisted upon it, and in this spirit the whole church had heard submissively that Calvin Van de Lear was to be their next pastor. This, of course, was conditional upon his behavior, and all knew that his father would be the last man to impose an injurious person on the church; they had little idea that "Cal." Van de Lear was devout, but took the old man's word that grace grew more and more in the sons of the Elect, and the young man had already professed "conviction," and voluntarily been received into the church. There he assumed, like an heir-apparent, the vicarship of the congregation, and it rather delighted his father that his son so promptly and complacently took direction of things, made his quasi pastoral rounds, led prayer-meetings, and exhorted Sunday-schools and missions. A priest knows the heart of his son no more than a king, and is less suspicious of him. The king's son may rebel from deferred expectation; the priest's son can hardly conspire against his father's pulpit. In the minister's family the line between the world and the faith is a wavering one; religion becomes a matter of course, and yet is without the mystery of religion as elsewhere, so that wife and sons regard ecclesiastical ambition as meritorious, whether the heart be in it piously or profanely. Calvin Van de Lear was in the church fold of his own accord,