An ornate service was decidedly to his taste. It was, therefore, a severe mortification when he found himself compelled to minister Sunday after Sunday in a building that was ugly enough for a conventicle, and to listen to the florid voices of a mixed choir, instead of the orderly array of men and boys in white surplices to which he had been accustomed. If he had been combative by nature,--one who loved to gird his armor about him and to plunge into every sort of _melee_,--he would have rejoiced after a fashion at the thought of the work cut out for him, of bringing order and beauty out of this chaos; but he was by nature too impatient. He would have condemned and destroyed instead of trying to renovate. "Why not build a new church at once?" he said, with a certain youthful intolerance that made people angry. "Never mind the vicarage; the old house will last my time: but a place like this--a rising place--ought to have a church worthy of it. It will be money thrown away to restore this one," finished the young vicar, looking round him with sorely troubled eyes; and it was this outspoken frankness that had lost him popularity at first. But, if the new vicar had secret cause for discontent in the Drummond family there was nothing but the sweetness of triumph. "Archie has never given me a moment's trouble from his birth," his proud mother was wont to declare; and it must be owned that the young man had done very fairly for himself. There had been plenty of anxiety in the Drummond household while Archibald was enjoying his first Oxford term. Things had come to a climax: his father, who was a Leeds manufacturer, had failed most utterly, and to a large amount. The firm of Drummond & Drummond, once known as a most respectable and reliable firm, had come suddenly, but not unexpectedly to the ground; and Archibald Drummond the elder had been compelled to accept a managership in the very firm that, by competition and underselling, had helped to ruin him. It was a heavy trial to a man of Mr. Drummond's proud temperament; but he went through with it in a tough, dogged way that excited his wife's admiration. True, his bread was bitter to him for a long time, and the sweetness of life, as he told himself, was over for him; but he had a large family to maintain, sons and daughters growing up around him, and the youngest was not yet six months old; under such circumstances a man may be induced to put his pride in his pocket. "Your father has grown quite gray, and has begun to stoop. It makes my heart quite ache to see him sometimes," Mrs. Drummond wrote to her eldest son; "but he never says a word to any of us. He just goes through with it day after day."