In a little while Meysie came cautiously out of the back door with a bowl of broth under her apron.  The minister had not stirred, deep in his folio Owen.  The young man ate the thick soup with a horn spoon from Meysie’s pocket.  Then he stood looking at her a moment before he took the dangling pencil again and wrote on the slate—­

“Soup’s good, but it’s money I must have!”

Meysie bent her head towards him.

“Ye shallna gang in to break yer faither’s heart, Clement; but I hae brocht ye a’ I hae, gin ye’ll promise to gang awa’ where ye cam’ frae.  Your faither kens nocht aboot your last ploy, or that a son o’ his has been in London gaol.”

“And who told you?” broke in the youth furiously.

The old woman could not, of course, hear him, but she understood perfectly for all that.

“Your ain sister Elspeth telled me!” she answered.

“Curse her!” said the young man, succinctly and unfraternally.  But he took the pencil and wrote—­“I promise to go away and not to disturb my father.”

Meysie took a lean green silk purse from her pocket and emptied out of it a five-pound note, three dirty one-pound notes, and seven silver shillings.  Clement Symington took them and counted them over without a blush.

“You’re none such a bad sort,” he said.

“Now, mind your promise, Clement!” returned his old nurse.

He made his way at a dog’s-trot down the half-snowed-up track that led towards the Ferry Town of the Cree; and though Meysie went to the stile of the orchard to watch, he ran out of sight without even turning his head.  When the old woman went in, the minister was still deep in his book.  He had never once looked up.

The short day faded into the long night.  Icy gusts drove down from the heights of Craig Ronald, and the wind moaned mysteriously over the ridges which separated the valley of the Cree Water from the remote fastnesses of Loch Grannoch.  The minister gathered his scanty family at the “buik,” and his prayer was full of a fine reverence and feeling pity.  He was pleading in the midst of a wilderness of silence, for the deaf woman heard not a word.

Yet it will do us no harm to hearken to the prayer of yearning and wrestling.

“O my God, who wast the God of my forefathers, keep Thou my two bairns.  They are gone from under my roof, but they are under Thine.  Through the storm and the darkness be Thou about them.  Let Thy light be in their hearts.  Though here we meet no more, may we meet an unbroken family around Thy heavenly hearth.  And have mercy on us who here await Thy hand, on this good ministering woman, and on me, alas!  Thine unworthy servant, for I am but a sinful man, O Lord!”

Then Meysie made down her box-bed in the kitchen, and the minister retired to his own little chamber.  He took his leather case out of his breast-pocket, and clasped it in his hand as he began his own protracted private devotions.  He knelt on a place where his knees had long since worn a hole in the waxcloth.  So, kneeling on the bare stone, he prayed long, even till the candle flickered itself out, smelling rankly in the room.