It was but a step to the kirk door from the manse, but it took the minister nearly twenty minutes to overcome the drifts and get the key turned in the lock—­for in these hard times it was no uncommon thing for the minister to be also the doorkeeper of the tabernacle.  Then he took hold of the bell-rope, and high above him the notes swung out into the air; for though the storm had now settled, vast drifts remained to tell of the blast of the night.  But the gale had engineered well, and as the minister looked over the half mile that separated the kirk from the nearest house of the clachan he knew that not a soul would be able to come to the kirk that day.  Yet it never occurred to him to put off the service of the sanctuary.  He was quite willing to preach to Euphemia Kerr alone, even so precious a discourse as he carried in his band-case that day.

The minister was his own precentor, as, according to the law and regulation of the kirks of Scotland, he always is in the last resort, however he may choose to delegate his authority.  He gave out from his swallow’s nest the Twenty-third Psalm, and led it off himself in a powerful and expressive voice, which sounded strangely in the empty church.  The tune was taken up from the manse pew, in the dusk under the little gallery, by a quavering, uncertain pipe—­as dry and unsympathetic as, contrariwise, the singer was warm-hearted and full of the very sap of human kindness.  The minister was so absorbed in his own full-hearted praise that he was scarce conscious that he was almost alone in the chill emptiness of the church.  Indeed, a strange feeling stole upon him, that he heard his wife’s voice singing the solemn gladness of the last verse along with him, as they had sung it together near forty years ago when she had first come to the hill kirk of Cauldshields.

  “Goodness and mercy all my life
    Shall surely follow me: 
  And in God’s house for evermore
    My dwelling-place shall be.”

Then the prayer echoed along the walls, bare like a barn before the harvest.  Nevertheless, I doubt not that it went straight to the throne of God as the minister pleaded for the weary and the heavy-laden, the fatherless and the oppressed, for the little children and those on whom the Lord has special pity—­“for to Thee, O Lord, more are the children of the desolate than the children of the married wife, saith the Lord.”  And the minister seemed to hear somewhere a sound of silent weeping, like that which he had hearkened to in the night long ago, when his wife sorrowed by his side and wept in the darkness for the loss of their only man-bairn.

The minister gave out his text.  There was silence within, and without the empty church only the whistling sough of the snowdrift.  “And when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck and kissed him.”