scape from conscience. Should this sweet
soul, that he loved more than his own, be lost? No; surely, it was a
sacred right and duty to win her heart and marry her, that he might take
her away from the atmosphere of religious indifference in which she
lived, and guide her to light and life.

Love won the day. "I will save her soul!" he said to himself; and with
this purpose always before him to hide a shadow, which whispered,--so he
thought,--"This is a sin," he asked her to be his wife.

He did not have to plead long. "I think I have always loved you," Helen
said, looking up into his eyes; and John was so happy that every thought
of anxiety for her soul was swallowed up in gratitude to God for her
love.

It was one midsummer afternoon that he reached Ashurst; he went at once
to the rectory, though with no thought of asking Dr. Howe's permission to
address his niece. It seemed to John as though there were only their two
souls in the great sunny world that day, and his love-making was as
simple and candid as his life.

"I've come to tell you I love you," he said, with no preface, except to
take her hands in his.

He did not see her often during their engagement, nor did he write her of
his fears and hopes for her; he would wait until she was quite away from
Ashurst carelessness, he thought; and beside, his letters were so full of
love, there was no room for theology. But he justified silence by saying
when they were in their own home he would show her the beauty of revealed
religion; she should understand the majesty of the truth; and their
little house, which was to be sacred as the shrine of human love, should
become the very gate of heaven.

It was a very little house, this parsonage. Its sharp pitch roof was
pulled well down over its eyes, which were four square, shining windows,
divided into twenty-four small panes of glass, so full of bubbles and
dimples that they made the passer-by seem sadly distorted, and the spire
of the church opposite have a strange bend in it.

John Ward's study had not a great many books. He could not afford them,
for one reason; but, with a row of Edwards, and some of Dr. Samuel
Hopkins' sermons, and pamphlets by Dr. Emmons, he could spare all but one
or two volumes of Hodge and Shedd, who, after all, but reiterate, in a
form suited to a weaker age, the teachings of Dr. Jonathan Edwards.

The dim Turkey carpet was worn down to the nap in a little path in front
of his bookshelves, w