Playing With Fire

by Amelia E. Barr

"Do you expect to find it in Blackie's bookshop?"

"I know not where to find it."

"It is lying there—at your right hand."

He glanced down at his right hand, and saw the familiar old Bible of his college days. The place-keeping ribbon was lying outside its pages, and he lifted the Book and replaced the ribbon; then, with a feeling of sorrowful tenderness, laid it, on a shelf of his bookcase. "My father put it in my hands the morning I went first to St. Andrews," he said softly, and then turned to Jessy, but she had left the room.

With a strange smile of satisfaction he touched the inner breast pocket of his long black vest, for in that pocket there lay a letter from Donald which was all his own. It had come to him by the same mail which brought Marion's, but some curious Scotch twist in his nature prompted him to conceal the fact. The root of this secrecy was undoubtedly selfishness. He did not want anyone else to see, or touch, or handle it—it was all his own, as long as it lay unspoken of in his breast wallet. There were things in it he could not bear to discuss—things that appeared to actually deny all the results he had declared would be the natural and certain consequences of Donald's disobedience and irreligious tendencies.

So he kept the letter in his breast and said nothing about it, and he went to Blackie's bookshop and brought home in his hand a volume by Mills with which he passed the long evening. Now and then he vouchsafed a few remarks on passing events, but upon the whole he had reason to congratulate himself upon his reticence and its success.

Nevertheless, it had been less successful than he imagined, for, after he had retired with Mr. Mills to the solitude of his study, Marion said, with a sigh, "He never named Donald, Aunt;" and Mrs. Caird answered sharply, "I am thinking, Marion, he knows all about Donald. He has had a letter his own self. The man is far too curious to have kept whist if he had not known what we were meaning by Donald's good fortune. No doubt Donald wrote to him. I would hardly believe your father if he said different."

After this event the gloomy winter of snow and rain and thick fog settled over the busy city, and people with firm-set lips and gloomy faces went doggedly about their business and tried not to mind the weather. But Dr. Macrae was acutely sensible to atmospheric conditions, and the nearly constant gloom and drizzle was but the outward sign of his mental and spiritual darkness and doubt. Day followed day in a monotonous despairing search for what he could not find, and life lost all its savor and searching all its hope and zest.

Finally his health began to suffer. He found out what it meant to be nervous and inadequate for duty. He became unreasonable or dourly despondent, and every change was marked by moods and tempers that affected the whole household. For the mind has malignant contagious diseases, as well as the body, and the black silent sulk or the fretful complaining in the study passed readily into every room of the gloomy household.

There are doubts that traverse the soul like a flash of lightning, burning their way through it; there are others that come slowly, insinuating themselves through a few careless words that somebody said because they had a clever ring. Doubt came to Ian like a mailed warrior, and met him, as Apollyon met Christian, with defiant words and straddling all over the way. What if there was no God? he asked boldly—if blind forces, beyond his comprehension, controlled the world? If life was only a semblance and mankind dreamers in it? What if the heavens were empty? If there was no one to answer prayer? If Christ had never risen? If the Word of God was not the Word of God?