ferred an open marriage as least
-school and church. You do not come to our meetings any more. My dear,
let us pray together in your affliction." The old man knelt in the
parlor and raised his voice in prayer--a clear, considerate, judicial,
sincere prayer, such as age and long authority gave him the right to
address to heaven. He was not unacquainted with sorrow himself; his
children had given him much concern, and even anguish, and in Calvin was
his last hope. A thread of wicked commonplace ran through them all; his
sterling nature in their composition was lost like a grain of gold in a
mass of alloy. They had nothing ideal, no reverence, no sense of
delicacy. Taking to his arms a face and form that pleased him, the
minister had not ingrafted upon it one babe of any divinity; that
coarser matrix received the sacred flame as mere mud extinguishes the
lightning. He fell into this reminiscence of personal disappointment
unwittingly, as in the process of his prayer he strove to comfort Agnes.
The moment he did so the cold magistracy of the prayer ceased, and his
voice began to tremble, and there ran between the ecclesiastic and his
parishioner the electric spark of mut
