Even during Sholto’s life-time there had hung over Juley’s dressing-table a rival text to the one in the lobby. No richly illuminated scroll, this, but a simple square of glossy, maroon-coloured cardboard, silver-edged, and showing up in silver letters the words –

TO THE JEW FIRST.

The importance of the Jews had been a subject on which Juley and her husband had differed, sometimes painfully, Juley, try as she might – and she never gave up trying – had not been able to convince Sholto that God’s promises in the Prophets had been particularly to His Chosen People. The curses, Sholto would admit, must apply to Israel; but everything else he appropriated to himself and those like-minded with him. Nor would he admit his illogicality in the matter. It was without his approval therefore that his wife had gone regularly to a seedy and unpopular Jewish mission on the South Side of the river.

Juley’s belief was that the scattered nation had been ordained to preach the Gospel in all parts of the world, thus hastening the return of Christ. She could not help regarding the most unattractive Hebrew as a second, or at least as a third cousin of her Saviour. And the lustrous-eyed men in greasy clothes who had cringed before Sholto, expanded – sometimes alarmingly – in the sunshine of his widow’s frank sympathy. More and more often they were to be seen at her table.

As for Sholto’s attitude with regard to the Second Advent, Juley had found it still more puzzling. As an evangelical, he had perforce held theoretically correct views on the subject. But Juley had only to mention what to her was the most joyous topic of the Gospels to realize that he considered the actual prospect highly inconvenient.

In this as in the Jewish question Sholto had had the discreet backing of his minister Dr. Ranken, and Juley had come away worsted more than once from visiting her pastor with a request that he would lend his pulpit to one of her Hebrew protégés. But Sholto had been dead over a year before the idea of leaving St. Jude’s occurred seriously to her.

It was a bold idea, for till then the Bannermans’ church had been as much a part of themselves as their house. Indeed it was more deeply connected than the house with their family tradition. Their grandfather had made it famous among Glasgow churches, and in the eyes of many among the congregation their father, as a prominent elder, had been a more important figure there than Dr. Ranken, the minister, who had begun his career merely as the great Dr. Bannerman’s assistant.