The maid drew back discomfited.

The minister began to repeat a psalm that she loved.  The daughters sat on the bedside, holding her hands.  So they waited, and she seemed to follow the meaning of the psalm as it went on, until suddenly——­

She turned her head feebly towards a space by the bed where no one stood.  She drew her aged hands from her daughters’, and made as if to stretch them out to a new-comer.  She smiled.

‘Mr. Kinnaird!’ she murmured; then she died.

‘You might have thought that he was there himself,’ said the daughters, awestruck.

And the minister said within himself, ’Who knows but that he was there?’

II

A MARRIAGE MADE IN HEAVEN

In the backwoods of Canada, about eighty miles north of Lake Ontario, there is a chain of three lakes, linked by the stream of a rapid river, which leads southward from the heart of a great forest.  The last of the three lakes is broad, and has but a slow current because of a huge dam which the early Scottish settlers built across its mouth in order to form a basin to receive the lumber floated down from the lakes above.  Hence this last lake is called Haven, which is also the name of the settlement at the side of the dam.  The worthy Scotsmen, having set up a sawmill, built a church beside it, and by degrees a town and a schoolhouse.  The wealth of the town came from the forest.  The half-breed Indian lumber-men, toiling anxiously to bring their huge tree-trunks through the twisting rapids, connected all thoughts of rest and plenty with the peaceful Haven Lake and the town where they received their wages; and, perhaps because they received their first ideas of religion at the same place, their tripping tongues to this day call it, not ‘Haven,’ but ‘Heaven.’

The town throve apace in its early days, and no one in it throve better than Mr. Reid, who kept the general shop.  He was a cheerful soul; and it was owing more to his wife’s efforts than his own that his fortune was made, for she kept more closely to the shop and had a sharper eye for the pence.

Mrs. Reid was not cheerful; she was rather of an acrid disposition.  People said that there was only one subject on which the shopkeeper and his wife agreed, that was as to the superiority of their daughter in beauty, talent, and amiability, over all other young women far or near.  In their broad Scotch fashion they called this daughter Eelan, and the town knew her as ‘Bonnie Eelan Reid’; everyone acknowledged her charms, although there might be some who would not acknowledge her preeminence.

Mr. and Mrs. Reid carried their pride in their daughter to a great extent, for they sent her to a boarding-school in the town of Coburgh, which was quite two days’ journey to the south.  When she came back from this educating process well grown, healthy, handsome, and, in their eyes, highly accomplished, the parents felt that there was no rank in the Canadian world beyond their daughter’s reach, if it should be her pleasure to attain it.