CHAPTER XIV

The meeting with my parents has a place in my memory so sacred that description seems desecration. My mother went white as the linen handkerchief she wore, and with one sharp cry, "O! William, it is Donald, our son! Oh my laddie, my laddie!" fell into my outstretched arms, weeping and laughing, in a violent hysteria of joy.

"There, there, Rachael, wife, don't take on so," said my father. "Of course it's Donald! You know I've always said he was not dead; he's well and strong, only broader and more manly looking,"—and he took mother out of my arms, and began to stroke her hair and to soothe her.

"And this is the little sister I left three years ago"—turning to Jean to hide my own emotion. "I can hardly believe it, yet the eyes are the same," and I kissed her and held her off to look at her, saying teasingly, "Why, Jean, you are almost as pretty as our mother."

"Do you hear that, mother?" asked my father in pleased tones. "Don hasn't forgotten his blarneying ways, either;—just the same lad who went away from us so many months ago."

Mother smiled at this, and ceased weeping, and together we went joyfully into the big room, where I was forced to turn aside to the window to blink back the tears that welled up at the recollections of my grandmother, which the familiar room with her chair still in its place called forth. Not until mother followed me to my room that night, to sit on the side of my bed, as she used to do when I was a little boy, did we talk of her. None of us wished to dim the pure joy of our first hours together by reference to our bereavement, and I had so much to tell them, so many questions to answer.

Then, mother gave me a minute history of grandmother's last days. "You and I, dear daughter," she had said to my mother, "will not for long be separated; I am just gangin' on a little before you, to make our real hame the mair ready for your welcome, but Donald's a young man, and will live a lang an' useful life, I trust. I should like to see him once mair on earth, an' gie him my last message. But since that could not be, Rachael, kiss him for me, and tell him the message's just the verra same as that I told him the day he held the last hank o' yarn for me—he'll not fail to remember, I'm sure."

Then I told my mother what it was grandmother had said to me, and also of the resolution I had made that day to live hereafter a Christian's life. Mother wept with me, tears of joy mixed with tears of regret that grandmother was not there to hear the glad news. "I hope, dear Donald," she said, as she kissed me good night, after the clock had chimed the midnight hour, "that your dear grandmother in heaven knows of your conversion, and that it adds to her perfect joy this day, as it has to mine."

I was too happy to go to sleep, my heart too full of thankfulness and high resolve, to be willing to waste the blessed moments in unconsciousness. So I lay awake until daybreak, tasting with keener and keener relish my new found holy joy. Then I fell asleep, and slept so restfully that, after two hours' repose, I awoke feeling as fresh as the robins, caroling joyously in the branches of the elms that shaded the eastern window of my room.