He had tried to part two young lovers who had chosen the straight and honest way. It was true that his duty to the kirk which had been his life, and which he himself was under condemnation according to his own standard, had seemed to him to conflict with the path he had marked out for Ralph.
But his own letters, breaking from their brittle confining band, poured in a cataract of folded paper and close-knit writing which looked like his own self of long ago, upon the table before him. He was condemned out of his own mouth.
Winsome sat with her face turned to the window, from which she could see the heathery back of a hill which heaved its bulk between the manse and the lowlands at the mouth of the Dee. There was a dreamy look in her eyes, land her heart was far away in that Edinburgh town from which she had that day received a message to shake her soul with love and pity.
The minister of the Dullarg looked up.
"Do you love him?" he asked, abruptly and harshly.
Winsome looked indignant and surprised. Her love, laid away in the depths of her heart, was sacred, and not thus to be at the mercy of every rude questioner. But as her eye rested on Allan Welsh, the unmistakable accent of sincerity took hold on her--that accent which may ask all things and not be blamed.
"I do love him," she said--"with all my heart."
That answer does not vary while God is in his heaven.
The eye of Allan Welsh fell on the miniature. The woman he had loved so long ago took part in the conversation.
"That is what you said twenty years ago!" the unseen Winsome said from the table.
"And he loves you?" he asked, without looking up.
"If I did not believe it, I could not live!"
Allan Welsh glanced with a keen and sudden scrutiny at Winsome Charteris; but the clearness of her eye and the gladness and faith at the bottom of it satisfied him as to his thought.
This Ralph Peden was a better man than he. A sad yearning face looked up at him from the table, and a voice thrilled in his ears across the years-"So did not you!"
"You know," said Allan Welsh, again untrue to himself, "that it is not for Ralph Peden's good that he should love you." The formal part of him was dictating the words.
"I know you think so, and I am here to ask you why," said Winsome fearlessly.
"And if I persuade you, will you forbid him?" said Allan Welsh, convinced of his own futility.