CHAPTER I. FRIDAY AFTERNOON. The Sunday sermon was finished, and the young rector of St. Mark’s turned gladly from his study-table to the pleasant south window where the June roses were peeping in, and abandoned himself for a few moments to the feeling of relief he always experienced when his week’s work was done. To say that no secular thoughts had intruded themselves upon the rector’s mind, as he planned and wrote his sermon, would not be true, for, though morbidly conscientious on many points and earnestly striving to be a faithful shepherd of the souls committed to his care, Arthur Leighton had all a man’s capacity to love and to be loved, and though he fought and prayed against it, he had seldom brought a sermon to the people of St. Mark’s in which there was not a thought of Anna Ruthven’s soft, brown eyes, and the way they would look at him across the heads of the congregation. Anna led the village choir, and the rector was painfully conscious that far too much of earth was mingled with his devotional feelings during the moments when, the singing over, he walked from his chair to the pulpit, and heard the rustle of the crimson curtain in the organ-loft as it was drawn back, disclosing to view five heads, of which Anna’s was the centre. It was very wrong he knew, and on the day when our story opens he had prayed earnestly for pardon, when, after choosing his text, “Simon, Simon, lovest thou me?” instead of plunging at once into his subject, he had, without a thought of what he was doing, idly written upon a scrap of paper lying near, “Anna, Anna, lovest thou me more than these?” the these referring to the wealthy Thornton Hastings, his old classmate in college, who was going to Saratoga this very summer for the purpose of meeting Anna Ruthven, and deciding if she would do to become Mrs. Thornton Hastings, and mistress of the house on Madison Square. With a bitter groan for the enormity of his sin, and a fervent prayer for forgiveness, the rector had torn the slips of paper in shreds and given himself so completely to his work, that his sermon was done a full hour earlier than usual, and he was free to indulge in reveries of Anna for as long a time as he pleased. “I wonder if Mrs. Meredith has come,” he thought, as, with his feet upon the window-sill, he sat looking across the meadow to where the chimneys and gable roof of Captain Humphreys’ house were visible, for Captain Humphreys was Anna Ruthven’s grandfather, and it was there she had lived since she was three years old. As if thoughts of Mrs. Meredith reminded him of something else, the rector took from the drawer of his writing-table a letter received the previous day, and opening to the second page, read as follows: