"Why! Mr. Alston!" said the cheerful voice of the Scotch minister's little wife, "you look as if you belonged to nobody, and nowhere!"
Then, seeing instantly that her words had hit too near the mark, she added quickly,
"I wish, if you aren't engaged, you would come home to supper with us. I always feel as if I wanted to be entertained after a wedding, as if it were very dull to go home to just an ordinary tea, and its being a Bank holiday seems to emphasise the feeling. Mr. Mackenzie and I were just saying so, weren't we, Will?"
"That is so," assented Mr. Mackenzie, with his grave smile, "I hear, Mr. Alston, that you are musical and might have played our organ for the marriage had we but known it. I have the organ keys, if you would care to try the instrument. It was unfortunate that our organist was away. I like a little singing at a wedding."
Reggie's face beamed.
"I'd like to come, awfully," he said, "what time shall I turn up?"
"Why, now!" said Mrs. Mackenzie, "we'll have tea at once and then the garden-boy shall blow for you, and we'll be audience, and then we can have supper and talk."
"That's the chief item in the programme, isn't it?" said her husband, with a twinkle.
Reggie tried to smother a laugh but did not succeed. This unexpected treat had wonderfully cheered his drooping spirits, and he laughed and chatted merrily as they walked to the Manse; but beneath the outward pleasure that the invitation gave him, there was running an undercurrent of deep happiness, for he knew that in the moment of the most intense loneliness, the most utter hopelessness that he had ever known, God had sent His angel and delivered him.
And Mrs. Mackenzie talked on in her usual cheerful, lighthearted way and never dreamed that she had been God's angel to any one that afternoon. Reggie was too shy to tell her, and she had not the key to the thoughts of the young organist who first woke the echoes of the church for her, with the strains of,