“Captain Robert is coming to-night and to-morrow all take their Christmas dinner with me; I said all, meaning John and Jessie, with their four children, and Mr. Kelly, with his bride, Isabel. She has been here just a week in the parsonage, which the people bought and fitted up when they heard their clergyman was to bring his wife among them. Judge Verner, too, is there, or rather at Squire Russell’s, where the children call him grandpa, and where he seems very fond of staying. He will divide his time between his daughters, and if that apoplectic fit of which Jessie spoke ever does make its appearance, Richard will be near to attend him, for the Judge will have no other physician. ‘Homœopathy is all a humbug,’ he says, ‘but hanged if he will take any other medicine.’ He has great pride now in Mrs. Squire Russell, who certainly has developed into a wonderfully domestic woman, so that Richard even cites her for my example. Perfectly happy at home, she seldom cares to leave it, but stays contentedly with the children, to whom she is a mother and a sister both. Johnnie calls her Jessie, but to the others she is mamma to all intents and purposes, and could Margaret know, she would surely bless the whistling, hoydenish girl, who is all the world now to husband and children both.
“Dear Jessie! I might write volumes in her praise, but this is the very last page of my journal, kept for so many years. The book is filled; whatever there was of romance in my girl history is within its pages, and here at its close I write myself a happy, happy woman. From the church-tower on the common the clock is striking twelve, and Richard, coming in from his long cold ride across the snow-clad hills, bids me a merry Christmas; then glancing at what I have written, he says, ‘Yes, darling, God has been very good to us. Let us love Him through the coming year more than ever we have done before.’
“With a full heart I say Amen, and so the story is done.”
THE END.
THE RECTOR OF ST. MARK’S.
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: