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a very fatal step. He was young, handsome, a clergyman, and unmarried.
Now a young unmarried minister is pre-eminently one of sorrows and
acquainted with grief. For that large body of well-meaning people who
are by nature incapacitated from attending to their own business take
him in hand without mercy. Innumerable are the ways in which he is
informed that he ought to be married. Subtle and past finding out are
the plots laid by all the old ladies and match-makers of his church
to promote that desired event. He is told that he can never succeed
in the ministry till he is married. The praises of Matilda Jane
Tompkins or Lucinda Brown are sounded in his ears till he almost
wishes that both were in a better world,--a world more worthy their
virtues. At length, wearily capitulating, he marries some wooden-faced
or angular saint, and is unhappy for life.

Now there was in Mr. Grey's church a good, gentle girl, narrow but not
wooden-faced, famous for her neatness and her housekeeping abilities,
who was supposed to be the pattern for a minister's wife. In time gone
by she had set her heart on a graceless sailor lad who was drowned at
sea, much to the relief of her parents. Ruth Anderson had mourned for
him quietly, shutting up her sorrow in her own breast and going about
her work as before; for hers was one of those subdued, practical
natures that seek relief from trouble in hard work.

She seemed in the judgment of all the old women in the church the
"very one" for Mr. Grey; and it likewise seemed that Mr. Grey was the
"very one" for her. So divers hints were dropped and divers things
were said, until each began to wonder if marriage were not a duty. The
Reverend Cecil Grey began to take unusual pains with his toilet, and
wended his way up the hill to Mr. Anderson's with very much the aspect
of a man who is going to be hanged. And his attempts at conversation
with the maiden were not at all what might have been expected from the
young minister whose graceful presence and fluent eloquence had been
the boast of Magdalen. On her part the embarrassment was equally
great. At length they were married,--a marriage based on a false idea
of duty on each side. But no idea of duty, however strong or however
false, could blind the eyes of this married pair to the terrible fact
that not only love but mental sympathy was wanting. Day by day Cecil
felt that his wife did not love him, that her thoughts were not for
him, that it was an ef