She had no idea what the words of the dear old psalm had been to the young Highlander—like water to a parched soul, bringing back memories of childhood, wooded glens, heather-clad hills, rippling burns, and above all the old grey kirk where the Scotch laddie used to sit beside his mother—that dear mother in whom his whole soul was wrapped up—and join lustily in the psalms.
The dinner-bell rang unheeded—somehow not one of the three could leave him.
"How lovely!" he said at last, opening and fixing his eyes on Eva. "I think God sent you to me."
"Ay, laddie," said the old Scotchman, taking the wasted hand in his, "but it seems to me you know the One who 'sticketh closer than a brother'? I see the 'peace of God' in your face."
"Ah, you are from my part of the country," said the lad joyfully, trying to raise himself, but sinking back exhausted. "I know it in your voice, it's just music to me. How good God has been to me!"
They were all too much touched by his words to answer him, and Eva could only bend over him and smooth his brow.
"Now mother will have some one to tell her about me," he added, turning to Mrs. Cameron, and grasping her hand. Then, as strength came back in some measure to the wasted frame, he went on in broken sentences to tell how he had been clerk in a big mercantile house in Hobart, how he had been invalided and lying in the hospital there for weeks. "But I have saved money," he added joyfully, "she need not feel herself a burden on my sister any more; my sister is married to a poor Scotch minister, and she lives with them, or was to, till I came home. Now that will never be. Oh, if I could just have seen her!"
"But you will see her again, laddie," said the old man. "Remember our own dear poet Bonar's words:
| "Where the child shall find his mother, |
| Where the mother finds the child, |
| Where dear families shall gather |
| That were scattered o'er the wild; |
| Brother, we shall meet and rest |
| 'Mid the holy and the blest." |
"Thank you," said the dying lad. "I think I could sleep." His eyes were closing, when a harsh loud voice with a foreign accent was heard near.