Miss Esperance was visibly affected; and of the three young men in the Manse seat, one laid his head down on his crossed arms, but he assuredly was not sleeping. When the service was over and Mr. Wycherly and Miss Esperance were walking home, she said timidly: "It was a beautiful discourse, don’t you think?" "I think," said Mr. Wycherly, "that he preached that sermon for his wife; and that it will be remembered when all his other sermons are forgotten. I am glad to have been there." That afternoon the little boys took their Sunday picture-books into the garden and sat on the grass under the alder tree; Mr. Wycherly, too, sat in a garden chair reading a sober-looking calf-bound book. Miss Esperance had returned from afternoon church, but she was so tired and upset that Elsa persuaded her for once to go and lie down in her room, and the children were warned not to disturb their aunt. Edmund’s book was a large Bible Alphabet with gaily-coloured pictures, which Miss Maggie Moffat had given him at the New Year. Montagu had brought out "Peep of Day," a work he detested, but choice on the Sabbath was limited in the house of Miss Esperance, so he looked at the "Child’s Bible Alphabet" with Edmund, and so often had they pored over the volume that they were familiar with all the characters from Abraham to Zacchaeus. Presently Edmund shut the book with a bang. "I shall know all these folks when I meet ’em, anyway," he said decidedly. "I’ve looked at ’em and looked: I’ve had enough of seeing them, Isaac and Noah and Jacob and Mrs. Potiphar and that dancing woman, Miriam—none of them very handsome, either," Edmund continued discontentedly. "Oh, I do wish the Sabbath was over, it’s such a long, long day." "I wonder," said Montagu musingly, "why the Bible people are always so ugly in pictures; so red and blue: real people aren’t as ugly as that even if they are a bit plain. Can you tell how it is, Guardie, dear? D’you suppose they’re really like the people in Edmund’s book?" "I expect," Mr. Wycherly said cautiously, laying down his "Alcestis" and smiling at Montagu’s earnest upturned face, "that they were very like the people we see every day, some neither very handsome nor very plain. Some beautiful and delightful." "I shall be disappointed," Edmund remarked, "if, after all, they turn out to be different from what they are in my book, after I’ve taken so much trouble to know them when Aunt Esperance covers the little poem at the bottom and the letter. You do think they’ll be like they are here, don’t you?" he asked anxiously. "I fear not," Mr. Wycherly said, shaking his head. "We can’t tell what they were like. You see, the artists who made the pictures in your book could only give their idea of the people they wished to represent——" "Then they aren’t kind of fortygraphs!" Edmund exclaimed aghast. "I sha’n’t really know them when I meet them, after all—they may be quite different! What a shame!"