Then they talked over the amounts to be spent on the marriage, on dress, visitors, the ceremony and traveling expense, and when some decision had been reached the Major was weary. He sighed heavily, and advised Ian to go home and try to be of a kinder and more familiar spirit. "And tell Marion," he said, "Lord Cramer will be in Glasgow in three or four months, and she must have all her 'braws' ready, for he will not hear tell of waiting--no, not for a day." CHAPTER X A DREAM For while all things were in quiet silence and the night was in the midst of her swift course.... Then suddenly visions of horrible dreams troubled them sore, and terrors came upon them unlooked for.--Wisdom of Solomon, 18: 14: 17. Dreams are rudiments of the great state to come. For nearly two weeks after the Minister's talk with his uncle something of the old cheerfulness and peace returned to the house on Bath Street. To Marion her father was exceedingly kind and generous, and the girl was radiantly happy in his love and in the many beautiful gifts by which he proved it. But "the good and the not so good," which is, to some extent, the inheritance of us all, gave him no rest, though for some days he was able partially to control the strife. He had been too intense a believer to stand still and say nothing about his doubts; and when a Scotchman has cast off Calvin, and been unable to accept Kant, he is not an agreeable man in domestic life. He was morbid, but he was not insincere, and he was really desperate concerning the salvation of his own soul. So the busy gladness of Mrs. Caird about the wedding preparations and the joyous voice and radiant face of Marion, as the stream of love was bearing her gently to the Happy Isles, rasped and irritated him. He was beginning to feel that he had done enough--to wonder if he could not go away until the marriage was an accomplished fact. Everything about it, as far as he was concerned, had undergone the earth and been touched by disappointment; and nothing had brought him back the calm peace, the sweet content, the abiding strength that his old trust in the God of His Fathers had always given. The cynicism of lost faith infected his nature. He was even less courteous to all persons than he had ever been before. The man was deteriorating on every side. "Oh, the regrets! the struggles and the failings! Oh, the days desolate! the wasted years!" To such mournful refrains he walked, hour after hour, the crowded streets and the narrow spaces of his own rooms; for he felt, even as St. Paul did, that, if all this great scheme of Christianity were not true, then its preachers were of all men most miserable. Generally speaking, poor Burns' prayer that we might see ourselves as others see us is surely an injudicious one, but if the Minister could have been favored with one day's observation of Ian Macrae, as he really appeared to his family, it might at least have given him food for reflection.