ncan Polite and incidentally turning
his back upon Donald. He shook hands with his host and without so much
as a nod towards the younger man, started for the gate. Duncan
followed him, protesting, but the minister could not stay. He did not
seem to hear the old man's timid suggestion that Donald would be going
down to the village, too, and would be glad to accompany him, but
strode off alone, indignation displayed in every line of his fine,
straight figure.

VI

THE FULFILMENT OF PROMISE

There was not one dissenting voice in the chorus of admiration sung by
the young people of Glenoro after their new pastor's social triumph at
the Hamiltons'. Everybody liked him and there went through the older
folk a thrill of joy that their pastor should be the leader of the
young and unsteady set, to bring them to a higher and nobler plane of
life.

Even Mrs. Fraser, the hypochondriac, was pleased with him in a mournful
sort of way. Of course, she was somewhat alarmed when Miss Cotton
declared that the minister was "jist a terror to cut up and could play
'Dan Tucker' better than Sandy Neil himself." But Annie Fraser
explained that Mr. Egerton had done it just to show that he wasn't
stiff or "stuck up."

This phase of the matter was a relief to her mother. Mrs. Fraser was a
person to whom the world and everything in it was one series of
ever-recurring disaster. She was a doleful body, taking pleasure only
in funerals and the laying out of the dead. With her peculiar taste
for sorrow and distress, she had come to be self-appointed nurse to the
whole neighbourhood. She was always due at the house of affliction
and, with her kindly heart and a certain skill in nursing, she proved a
sort of melancholy blessing. Her predilection for disaster caused her
to be regarded as a bird of ill-omen, for where Mrs. Fraser was, there
would calamities be gathered together, and to see her issue from the
big gate on the brow of the south hill with her ominous-looking black
bag was sufficient to raise apprehension in every heart. Indeed, Mrs.
Duffy, who lived nearly opposite the Frasers and who regarded the
village nurse with something akin to superstitious fear, would throw up
her hands at the sight of the herald of misfortune passing the door and
exclaim, "God bless me sowl, who's dead now?"

So if Mrs. Fraser was willing to look hopefully on the actions of the
new minister, the rest of the congregation might feel themselves