"With all her excellencies, there was also in her what I have noticed in most women, a certain flavour of guile, and on one occasion, when I was making a brief journey through Holland and France in search of comely editions of the fathers, she had the books carried out to the garden and dusted. It was the space of two years before I regained mastery of my library again, and unto this day I cannot lay my hands on the service book of King Henry VIII., which I had in the second edition, to say nothing of an original edition of Rutherford's _Lex Rex_. "It does not become me, however, to reflect on the efforts of that worthy matron, for she was by nature a good woman, and if any one could be saved by good works, her place is assured. I was with her before she died, and her last words to me were, 'Tell Jean tae dust yir bukes aince in the sax months, and for ony sake keep ae chair for sittin' on.' It was not the testimony one would have desired in the circumstances, but yet, Mr. Carmichael, I have often thought that there was a spirit of . . . of unselfishness, in fact, that showed the working of grace." Later in the same evening Mr. Saunderson's mind returned to his friend's spiritual state, for he entered into a long argument to show that while Mary was more spiritual, Martha must also have been within the Divine Election. CHAPTER XI. IN THE GLOAMING. August is our summer time in the north, and Carmichael found it pleasant walking from Lynedoch bridge to Kilbogie. The softness of the gloaming, and the freshness of the falling dew, and the scent of the honeysuckle in the hedge, and the smell of the cut corn in the fields--for harvest is earlier down there than with us--and the cattle chewing the cud, and the sheltering shadow of old beech trees, shed peace upon him and touched the young minister's imagination. Fancies he may have had in early youth, but he had never loved any woman except his mother and his aunt. There had been times when he and his set declared they would never marry, and one, whose heart was understood to be blighted, had drawn up the constitution of a celibate Union. It was never completed--and therefore never signed--because the brotherhood could not agree about the duration of the vows--the draftsman, who has been twice married since then, standing stiffly for their perpetuity, while the others considered that a dispensing power might be lodged in the Moderator of Assembly.