With this bracing resolution, that seemed a call of God to deliver him from bondage, came a longing to visit Kilbogie Manse and the Rabbi's grave. It was a journey of expiation, for Carmichael followed the road the Rabbi walked with the hand of death upon him after that lamentable Presbytery, and he marked the hills where the old man must have stood and fought for breath. He could see Mains, where he had gone with Doctor Saunderson to the exposition, and he passed the spot where the Rabbi had taken farewell of George Pitillo in a figure. What learning, and simplicity, and unselfishness, and honesty, and affection were mingled in the character of the Rabbi! What skill, and courage, and tenderness, and self-sacrifice, and humility there had been also in William MacLure, who had just died! Carmichael dwelt on the likeness and unlikeness of the two men, who had each loved the highest he knew and served his generation according to the will of God, till he found himself again with the Drumtochty doctor on his heroic journeys, with the Rabbi in his long vigils. It was a singular means of grace to have known two such men in the flesh, when he was still young and impressionable. A spiritual emotion possessed Carmichael. He lifted his heart to the Eternal, and prayed that if on account of any hardship he shrank from duty he might remember MacLure, and if in any intellectual strait he was tempted to palter with truth he might see the Rabbi pursuing his solitary way. The district was full of the Rabbi, who could not have gone for ever, who might appear any moment--buried in a book and proceeding steadily in the wrong direction. The Rabbi surely was not dead, and Carmichael drifted into that dear world of romance where what we desire comes to pass, and facts count for nothing. This was how the Idyll went. From the moment of the reconciliation the Rabbi's disease began to abate in a quite unheard of fashion--love wrought a miracle--and with Kate's nursing and his he speedily recovered. Things came right between Kate and himself as they shared their task of love, and so . . . of course--it took place last month--and now he was going to carry off the Rabbi, who somehow had not come to the Presbytery, to Drumtochty, where his bride would meet them both beneath the laburnum arch at the gate. He would be cunning as he approached the door of Kilbogie Manse, and walk on the grass border lest the Rabbi, poring over some Father, should hear the crunch of the gravel--he did know his footstep--and so he would take the old man by surprise. Alas! he need not take such care, for the walk was now as the border with grass, and the gate was lying open, and the dead house stared at him with open, unconscious eyes, and knew him not. The key was in the door, and he crossed the threshold once more--no need to beware of parcels on the floor now--and turned to the familiar room. The shelves had been taken down, but he could trace