You will think it was the deepest presumption on her part, to think she could meet the emergency better than her father would. And so it was, and yet not so at all. It was only that there were no doubts in her mind, and there were doubts, she knew, inconceivable doubts, shadows, self-deceptions, on his. A great many thoughts went through her mind, as she stood thus looking across the level of the calm sea--although it was scarcely for a minute altogether, that she underwent this faintness and sickening, which was both physical and mental. The cold touch of the wet rock, the slipping tangles of dark green leathery dulse which made her grasp slip, brought her to herself, and brought her colour rushing back. She turned round to Frank with a smile, which made the young man’s heart beat. “But I am awfully anxious not to have papa disturbed,” she said. “You know he is not just like other folk; and when he is interrupted at his writing it breaks the--the thread of his thoughts, and sometimes he cannot get back the particular thing he was meditating upon (it seemed to Elsie that the right words were coming to her lips, though she did not know how, like a sort of inspiration which overawed, and yet uplifted her). And then perhaps it will be his sermon that will suffer, and he always suffers himself when that is so.” “He has very little occasion to suffer in that way,” cried Frank, “for every one says--and I think so myself, but I am no judge--that there is no one that preaches like him, either in the town or through all Fife. I should say more than that--for I never in London heard any sermons that I listened to as I do to his.” Elsie beamed upon her lover like the morning sun. It was strictly true to the letter, but, whether there might be anything in the fact, that none of these discredited preachers in London were father to Elsie, need not be inquired. It gave the minister’s daughter a keen pang of pleasure to hear this flattering judgment. It affected her more than her mother’s recommendation, or any of her own serious thoughts. She felt for a moment as if she could even love Frank Mowbray, and get to think him the first of men. “Come and let me see the new beast,” she said, with what was to Frank the most enchanting smile. CHAPTER XVIII. JOHNNY WEMYSS.