Rodie and his sister had come a little nearer with the progress of the years. From the proud moment, when the youth felt the down of a coming moustache upon his upper lip, and began to perceive that he was by no means a bad-looking fellow, and to feel inclinations towards balls and the society of girls, scorned and contemned so long as he was merely a boy, he had drawn a little closer to his sister, who had, as it were, the keys of that other world. It was a little selfish, perhaps; but, in a family, one must not look too closely into motives; and Elsie, faithful to her first affection, was glad enough to get him back again, and to find that he was, by no means, so scornful of mere “lassies,” as in the days when his desertion had made her little heart so sore. Perhaps it had something to do with his conversion, that “his laddies,” the Alicks and Ralphs of his boyish days, had all taken (at least, as many as remained of them, those who had not yet gone off to the army, or the bar, or the W.S.’s office) to balls also, and now danced as vigorously as they played. One of the strangest things, however, in all that juvenile band, was the change which had come over Johnny Wemyss, who, the reader will remember, was only a fisherman’s son, and lived east the town in a fisher’s cottage, and was not supposed the best of company for the minister’s son. Johnny, the romantic, silent boy, who had put down his flowers on the pavement that the bride’s path might be over them, had taken to learning, as it was easy for the poorest boy, in such a centre of education, to do. As was usual, when a lad of his class showed this turn, which was by no means extraordinary, it was towards the Church that the parents directed their thoughts, and Johnny had taken all his “arts” classes, his “humanities,” the curriculum of secular instruction, and was pondering doctrine and exegesis in the theological branch, on his way to be a minister, at the moment in their joint history at which we have now arrived. I am not sure that even then he was quite sure that he himself intended to be a minister; for, being a serious youth by nature, he had much loftier views of that sacred profession than, perhaps, it was possible for a minister’s son, trained up in over-much familiarity with it, to have. But his meaning was, as yet, not very clear to himself; he was fonder of “beasts,” creatures of the sea-coast, fishes, and those half-inanimate things, which few people, as yet, had begun to think of at all, than of anything else in the world, except.... I will not fill in this blank; perhaps the young reader will guess what was the thing Johnny Wemyss held in still higher devotion than “his beasts;” at all events, if he follows the thread of this story, he will in time find out.