"I believe your prayer has been answered. I never felt so strangely—so happy before."
"Come with me," cried the old man, impetuously, "come with me. Your mother must learn at once that her son, who 'was dead, is alive again';" and a few moments later Haldane was once more in the low carriage, on his way, with the enthusiastic doctor, to his old home.
"We won't permit ourselves to be announced," said the childlike old clergyman as they drove up the gravelled road. "We will descend upon your mother and sisters like an avalanche of happiness."
The curtains in the sitting-room were not drawn, and the family group was before them. The apartment was furnished with elegance and taste, but the very genius of dreariness seemed to brood over its occupants. The sombre colors of their mourning dresses seemed a part of the deep shadow that was resting upon them, and the depth and gloom of the shadow was intensified by their air of despondency and the pallor of their faces. The younger daughter was reading, but the elder and the mother held their hands listlessly in their laps, and their eyes were fixed on vacancy, after the manner of those whose thoughts are busy with painful themes.
Haldane could endure but a brief glance, and rushed in, exclaiming:
"Mother, forgive me!"
His presence was so unexpected and his onset so impetuous that the widow had no time to consider what kind of a reception she ought to give her wayward son, of whom she had washed her hands.
Her mother-love triumphed; her heart had long been sore with grief, and she returned his embrace with equal heartiness.
His sisters, however, had inherited more of their mother's conventionality than of her heart; and the fact that this young man was their brother did not by any means obliterate from their minds the other facts, that he had a very bad reputation and that he was abominably dressed. Their greeting, therefore, was rather grave and constrained, and suggested that there might have been a death in the family, and that their brother had come home to attend the funeral.
But the unworldly Dr. Marks was wholly absorbed in the blessed truth that the dead was alive and the lost found. He had followed Haldane into the apartment, rubbing his hands, and beaming general congratulation. Believing that the serene light of Heaven's favor rested on the youth, he had forgotten that it would be long before society relaxed its dark frown. It seemed to him that it was an occasion for great and unmixed rejoicing.