The Rector of St. Marks

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 that 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 possessed the natural desire that those who

listened to him should not only think well of what he taught but also

of the form in which the teaching was presented. When he became a

clergyman he did not cease to be a man, with all a man's capacity to

love and to be loved, and so, 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 armchair to the

pulpit and heard the rustle of the crimson curtain in the organ loft

as it was drawn back, disclosing to view the five heads of which

Anna's was the center. It was very wrong, he knew, and to-day 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 at 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-land to where

the chimneys and gable roof of Captain Humphreys' house was visible,

for Captain Humphreys was Anna Ruthven's grandfather, and it was there

she had lived since she was three years old.