ersuasions to virtue. It had never occurred to the mind of this
old-fashioned gentleman that congregations are now so highly improved,
so cultivated and intellectual, that they require but a few moments of
dispassionate reminder from the pulpit once a week, that on the whole it
is better to be moral, and, likewise, that any assumption of the
functions of a teacher on the part of a clergyman is now quite obsolete
and even laughable--these modern axioms Middleton Moore had not yet
learned; the mistaken man went on hopefully exhorting for a full
three-quarters of an hour. And as his congregation were as old-fashioned
as himself, no objection had as yet been made to this course, the simple
people listening with respect to all he had to say, not only for what it
was in itself, but for what he was in himself--a man without spot, one
who, in an earlier age, would have gone through martyrdom with the same
pure, gentle firmness with which he now addressed them from a pulpit of
peace. It was in this little church of St. Philip and St. James' that
Evert Winthrop had first beheld Garda Thorne.

The next day he presented a letter of introduction which his aunt, Mrs.
Rutherford, had given him before he left New York; the letter bore the
address, "Mrs. Carew." Winthrop had not welcomed this document, he
disliked the demand for attention which epistles usually convey. How
much influence the beautiful face seen in church had upon its
presentation when he finally made it, how long, without that accident,
the ceremony might have been delayed, it would be difficult, perhaps, to
accurately state. He himself would have said that the beautiful face had
hastened it somewhat; but that in time he should have obeyed his aunt's
wish in any case, as he always did. For Winthrop was a good nephew, his
aunt had given him the only mother's love his childhood had known.

Mrs. Carew, who as Betty Gwinnet had been Mrs. Rutherford's room-mate at
a New York school forty-four years before, lived in one of the large,
old, rather dilapidated houses of Gracias; she was a widow, portly,
good-natured, reminiscent, and delighted to see the nephew of her
"dearest Katrina Beekman." It was not until his second visit that this
nephew broached the subject of the face seen in church, and even then he
presented it so slightly, with its narrow edge towards her, as it were,
that the good lady never had a suspicion that it was more than a chance
allusion on his part, and in