What can be the purpose in creation of such brutes? They are enough to have staggered even your prophet Erskine of Linlathen.” CHAPTER XIX “_Nothing mars or misleads the influence that issues from a pure and humble and unselfish character. A man’s gifts may lack opportunity, his efforts may be misunderstood and resisted; but the spiritual power of a consecrated will needs no opportunity and can enter where the doors are shut._”--Dean Paget. |Macneillie read and re-read this letter with the awful craving of a man whose love has for years been starved of all knowledge of the beloved, except the mere knowledge that she was still in the world. He had, of course, seen her name daily in the papers, and had known what plays she was acting in, but of her real life he had known nothing. He had tried to think that her marriage though necessarily falling below his ideal of married life might at any rate be as happy as the average, might at least be tranquil and not without a certain comfortable respectability. But the brief account given in Ralph’s letter, and the many details which he could so easily read between the lines--filled him with misery. The post had brought him as usual a mass of correspondence; with a sigh of impatience he ran through it, then pushing it aside caught up his hat and hurriedly left the house. He was in no humour to climb the hill-side to the wishing-well; instead, he passed through the village, over Callander Bridge, and taking a little footpath across the meadows, sought out a favourite nook of his beside the river Teith, which wound its peaceful course through the hayfields. A tiny wood had sprung up near this walk at one part, and Macneillie had a special affection for a certain beech-tree which stood just at a bend in the river, and under its shade many of his pleasantest holiday hours were spent. He threw himself down now on the sloping bank beneath it. Everything was curiously still and peaceful; Ben Ledi rose majestically in the distance, framed by soft foliage in the foreground, and the river was emphatically one of those which “glideth at his own sweet will,” a great contrast to the Leny, which dashed and foamed through its rocky pass. It was just this calm peacefulness he longed for in his inward struggle. With all the vividness of one blessed or cursed with a powerful imagination, he realised Christine as she now was. He knew instinctively that her heart had awakened from its sleep, that, with the dead failure of the _mariage de convenance_, her love which had only lain dormant had returned--but had returned of course to torture her. Hitherto he had been able to think of Sir Roderick Fenchurch with a sort of impartiality. He knew so very little about him; and it was Macneillie’s nature to think well of people until they disillusioned him; he had even felt a sort of compassion for the man, because he knew that he could never really possess Christine’s heart as he, for a time at any rate, had possessed it.