of his boy and girl.  He liked to know that it was safe.  Elspeth had recently sent him a new portrait of herself in evening dress, with diamonds in her hair.  It came from London in a large envelope with the florid monogram of Lady Smythe, the widow of the ex-Lord Mayor, upon it.  The minister considered it the last triumph of art, and often took it out of his pocket to look at when he thought Meysie was not looking.  She always was, however.  She had little else to do.  Nevertheless, Meysie knew, for all that, the worn yellow “card” of the lost son who never wrote or sent him anything, to be the dearest to him.

While the minister sat pondering over his book, Meysie went to the back door, and stood there a moment vaguely gazing out on the snow.  As she did so, a figure came slouching round the corner of the byre.  Meysie quickly shut the door behind her, and turned the key.  Any visitor was a strange surprise in winter at the Clints of Drumore.  But this figure she knew at the first glance.  It was the Prodigal Son come home—­the boy whom she had reared from the time that she took his sister from his dying mother’s arms.  Some deadly fear constrained her to lock the door behind her.  For the lad’s looks were terribly altered.  There was a sullen, callous dourness where bright self-will had once had its dwelling.  His clothing had once been fashionable, but it was now torn at the buttonholes and frayed at the cuffs.

“Clement Symington, what brings ye to the Clints o’ Drumore?” asked the old woman, going forward and taking hold of the skirts of his surtout, her face blanched like the blue shadows on the winter snow.

“Why, Mother Hubbard—­” he broke out.

But Meysie stopped him, holding up her hand and pointing to her slate, which hung by a “tang” round her neck.

“Ha!” he murmured, “this is awkward—­old woman gone deaf.”

So he took the pencil and wrote—­

“Very hard up.  Want some cash from the old man,” just as if he had been writing a telegram.

With her spectacles poised on the end of her nose, Meysie read the message.  Her face took a hue greyer and duller than ever.

She looked at the lad she had once loved so well, and his shifty eye could not meet hers.  He looked away over the moor, put his hands into his pockets, and whistled a music-hall catch, which sounded strangely in that white solitude.

“Weel do you ken that your faither has no sillar!” said Meysie.  “You had a’ the sillar, and what ye hae done with it only you an’ your Maker ken.  But ye shallna come into this hoose to annoy yer faither.  Gang to the barn, and wait till I bring you what I can get.”

The young man grumblingly assented, and within that chilly enclosure he stood swearing under his breath and kicking his heels.

“A pretty poor sort of prodigal’s return this,” he said, remembering the parable he used to learn to say to his father on Sunday afternoons; “not so much as a blessed fatted calf—­only a half-starved cow and a deaf old woman.  I wonder what she’ll bring a fellow.”