He also hoped
that, his displeasure gradually passing, he would resume his friendly
intercourse with himself; for somehow there was that in the gloomy parson
which powerfully attracted the cheery and hopeful soutar, who hoped his
troubled abstraction might yet prove to be heart-hunger after a spiritual
good which he had not begun to find: he might not yet have understood, he
thought, the good news about God--that he was just what Jesus seemed to
those that saw the glory of God in his face. The minister could not, the
soutar thought, have learned much of the truth concerning God; for it
seemed to wake in him no gladness, no power of life, no strength to _be_.
For _him_ Christ had not risen, but lay wrapt in his winding sheet! So far
as James's feeling was concerned, the larks and the angels must all be
mistaken in singing as they did!
At an hour that caused the soutar anxiety as to whether the housekeeper
might not have retired for the night, he rang the bell of the manse-door;
which in truth did bring the minister himself from his study, to confront
MacLear on the other side of the threshold, with the new boots in his hand.
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