‘Surely ye’ve not forgotten Ann Johnston, ma’am?’ the nurse would ask, carefully tending her old mistress.

The force of long habit had made the old lady patient and courteous, but no answering gleam came in her face.

‘Ye know who I am?’ the new maid would cry in kindly triumph.

‘Oh, ay, I know you, Jeanie Trim.’

‘And now, look, I brought you a fine cup of milk, warm from the byre.’

‘Oh, I canna tak’ it; I’m no thinking that I care about eating the day.’

’Well, but I want to tell ye’—­with an air of mystery.  ’Who d’ye think’s downstairs?  It’s Mr. Kinnaird himself.’

‘Did he come round by the yard to the dairy door?’

‘That he did; and all to ask how ye were the day.’

The sparkle of the eye returned, and the smile that almost seemed to dimple the wrinkled cheek.

’And I hope ye offered him something to eat, Jeanie; it’s a long ride he takes.’

‘Bread and cheese, and a cup of milk just like this.’

‘What did he say?  Did he like what ye gave him?’

’He said a sup of milk sudna cross his lips till you’d had a cupful the like of his; so I brought it in to ye.  You’d better make haste and take it up.’

‘Did he send ye wi’ the cup, Jeanie Trim?’

’Ay, he did that; and not a bit nor sup will he tak till ye’ve drunk it all, every drop.’

With evident delight the cup was drained.

‘Ye told him I was ailing and couldna see him the day, Jeanie?’

‘Maybe ye’ll see him to-morrow.’  The maid stooped and folded the white shawl more carefully over the dame’s breast, and smiled in protective kindly fashion.  She had a good heart and a womanly, motherly touch, although many a mistress had called her wilful and pert.

There were times when the minister came and sat himself behind his aunt’s chair to watch and to listen.  He was a meditative man, and wrote many an essay upon modern theology, but here he found food for meditation of another sort.

There was no being in the world that he reverenced as he had reverenced this aged lady.  In his childhood she had taught him to lisp the measures of psalm and paraphrase; in his youth she had advised him with shrewdest wisdom; in his ministerial life she had been to him a friend, always holding before him a greater spiritual height to be attained, and now——­ He thought upon his uncle as he had known him, a very reverent elder of the kirk, a man who had led a long and useful life, and to whom this woman had rendered wifely devotion.  He thought upon his cousins, in whose lives their mother’s life had seemed unalterably bound up.  He would at times emerge from his corner, and, sitting down beside the lady, would take her well-worn Bible and read to her such passages as he knew were graven deep upon her heart by scenes of joy or sorrow, parting or meeting, or the very hours of birth or death, in the lives that