As he glanced across the room he saw that the sunlight was streaming full upon the sleeper, he got up and lowered the blind pausing for a minute by the sofa to look at his companion. Ralph was sound asleep, and his untroubled, boyish face was worth looking at if only for its peace. To Macneillie it suggested many thoughts. He remembered his first impression of Ralph, lying in the last stage of misery on the banks of the Leny, and he delighted to think that partly by his aid the lad had battled through his difficulties and had got his foot firmly planted on the ladder of success. There is nothing so strange in life as the manner in which a kindly deed re-acts in a thousand subtle ways on the doer. And now, as had been the case before, Macneillie was lured back to life by the one he had helped long ago. The hard thoughts passed, he stood there in the bright spring morning strong once more in the belief that the eternal patience of the All-Father schools each son in the best possible way. Sitting down to the writing-table he filled up a couple of hours with answering the letters of the previous day, then when the time came, set off with Ralph to the Abbey and finding the way to the Baptistry unbarred waited there beside the busts of Maurice and Kingsley, lifted a degree nearer to that Light and Love of which their epitaphs spoke by the struggle he had just passed through. They were joined here by Mrs. Hereford, Bride, and Evereld, and Macneillie thought he had never seen anything more winning than Evereld’s eager welcome of her lover. He felt very much in harmony with their happiness as they all went together into the choir, and indeed throughout the day the depression which had overwhelmed him since he had received the bad news at Brighton was banished by the unalloyed bliss of the two who were just stepping into their goodly heritage of mutual love and companionship. It was a thoroughly unconventional wedding with merely the merry Irish family in the house, with Bride and the two little Hereford girls for bridesmaids, and Macneillie and an old school fellow who had returned from Canada just in time to be Ralph’s best man, as the only outsiders. Of course, when at two o’clock they drove to the church, it was crowded with spectators, for the marriage of the heiress who had been defrauded of her fortune by Sir Matthew Mactavish had found its inevitable way into the hands of the paragraph-mongers. But then, as Macneillie remarked, a marriage ought to take place before a congregation, and it would have been a thousand pities if this particular marriage had been smuggled through in secret at some chilly hour of the morning in an empty church.