At the deepest time of the night, while the snow winds were raging about the half-buried cot, the dark figure of a young man opened the never-locked door and stepped quickly into the small lobby in which the minister’s hat and worn overcoat were hanging.  He paused to listen before he came into the kitchen, but nothing was to be heard except the steady breathing of the deaf woman.  He came in and stepped across the floor.  The red glow from the peats on the hearth revealed the figure of Clement Symington.  He shook the snow from his coat and blew on his fingers.  Then he went to the door of his father’s room and listened.  Hearing no sound, he slowly opened it.  His father had fallen asleep on his knees, with his forehead on his open Bible.  The red glow of the dying peat-fire lighted the little room.  “I wonder where he keeps his cash,” he murmured to himself; “the sooner it’s over the better.”  His eye caught something like a purse in his father’s hand.  As he took it, something broad and light fell out.  He held it up to the moonbeam which came through the narrow upper panes.  It was his own portrait taken in the suit which his father had bought him to go to college in.  He had found the old man’s wealth.  A strangeness in his father’s attitude caught his eye.  With a sudden, quick return of boyish affection he laid his hand on the bowed shoulder, forgetting for the moment his evil purpose and all else.  The attenuated figure swayed and would have fallen to the side, had Clement Symington not caught it and laid his father tenderly on the bed.  Then he stood upright and cried aloud in agony with that most terrible of griefs—­the repentance that comes too late.  But none heard him.  The deaf woman slept on.  And the dead gave no answer, being also for ever deaf and dumb.

II

A MINISTER’S DAY

  On either side the great and still ice sea
    Are compassing snow mountains near and far;
    While, dominant, Schreckhorn and Finsteraar
  Hold their grim peaks aloft defiantly.

  Blind with excess of light and glory, we,
    Above whose heads in hottest mid-day glare
    The Schreckhorn and his sons arise in air,
  Sink in the weary snowfields to the knee;

  Then, resting after peril pass’d in haste,
    We saw, from our rock-shelter’d vantage ledge,
    In the white fervent heat sole shadowy spot,

  Familiar eyes that smiled amid the waste—­
    Lo! in the sparsed snow at the glacier edge,
    The small blue flower they call Forget-me-not!

The sun was glinting slantwise over the undulating uplands to the east.  Ben Gairn was blushing a rosy purple, purer and fainter than the flamboyant hues of sunset, when the Reverend Richard Cameron looked out of his bedroom window in the little whitewashed manse of Cairn Edward.  His own favourite blackbird had awakened him, and he lay for a long while listening to its mellow fluting, till his conscience reproached him for lying so long a-bed on such a morning.