No one spoke, but Robin saw tears running down his mother's face. John Fordyce deliberately turned back several pages of the Bible.
"We will sing," he said in a clear voice, "in the Twenty-third Psalm—the whole of it!—
'The Lord's my Shepherd, I'll not want——'"
The Psalms of David, as rendered into English verse by Nahum Tate and others, are not remarkable for poetic merit; neither does the old Scottish fashion of singing the same, seated and without accompaniment, conduce to a concord of sweet sounds. But there are no tunes like old tunes, and there are no hearts like full hearts. If ever a song went straight up to heaven, the Twenty-third Psalm, borne up on the wings of "Martyrdom," did so that night.
[CHAPTER TWO.]
INTRODUCES A PILLAR OF STATE AND THE APPURTENANCES THEREOF.
The time had undoubtedly arrived when I must have a Private Secretary.
Kitty, for one, insisted on it. She said that I was ruining my health in the service of an ungrateful country, and added that she, personally, declined to be left a widow at twenty-eight-and-a-half to oblige anybody.
"It is exactly the wrong age," she said. "If it had happened four or five years ago, I could have done pretty well for myself. Now, I should be out of the running among the débutantes, and a little too young and flighty to suit a middle-aged bachelor."