“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.

Winsome’s heart caught the accent of insincerity.  It had gone far beyond forbidding love or allowing it with Ralph Peden and herself.

“I shall try!” she said, with her own sweet serenity.  But across the years a voice was pleading their case.  As the black and faded ink of the letters flashed his own sentences across the minister’s eye, the soul God had put within him rose in revolt against his own petty and useless preaching.

“So did not you” persisted the voice in his ear.  “Me you counselled to risk all, and you took me out into the darkness, lighting my way with love.  Did ever I complain—­father lost, mother lost, home lost, God well nigh lost—­all for you; yet did I even regret when you saw me die?”

“Think of the Marrow kirk,” said the minister.  “Her hard service does not permit a probationer, before whom lies the task of doctrine and reproof, to have father or mother, wife or sweetheart.”

“And what did you,” said the voice, “in that past day, care for the Marrow kirk, when the light shone upon me, and you thought the world, and the Marrow kirk with it, well lost for love’s sake and mine?”

Allan Welsh bowed his head yet lower.

Winsome Charteris went over to him.  His tears were falling fast on the dulled and yellowing paper.

Winsome put her hands on his shoulder.

“Is that my mother’s picture?” she said, hardly knowing what she said.

Allan Welsh put his hand greedily about it, he could not let it go.

“Will you kiss me for your mother’s sake?” he said.

And then, for the first time since her babyhood, Winsome Charteris, whose name was Welsh, kissed her father.

There were tears on her mother’s miniature, but through them the face of the dead Winifred seemed to smile well pleased.

“For my mother’s sake!” said Winsome again, and kissed him of her own accord on the brow.

Thus Walter Skirving’s message was delivered.

CHAPTER XLI.

The meeting of the synod.

With the vestry of the Marrow kirk in Bell’s Wynd the synod met, and was constituted with prayer.  Sederunt, the Reverend Gilbert Peden, moderator, minister of the true kirk of God in Scotland, commonly called the Marrow Kirk, in which place the synod for the time being was assembled; the Reverend Allan Welsh, minister of the Marrow kirk in Dullarg, clerk of the synod; John Bairdieson, synod’s officer.  The minutes of the last meeting having been read and approved of, the court proceeded to take up business.  Inter alia the trials of Master Ralph Peden, some time student of arts and humanity in the College of Edinburgh, were a remit for this day and date.  Accordingly, the synod called upon the Reverend Allan Welsh, its clerk, to make report upon the diligence, humility, and obedience, as well as upon the walk and conversation of the said Ralph Peden, student in divinity, now on trials for license to preach, the gospel.