'Did he send ye wi' the cup, Jeanie Trim?'

'Ay, he did that; and not a bit nor sup will he tak till ye've drunk it
all, every drop.'

With evident delight the cup was drained.

'Ye told him I was ailing and couldna see him the day, Jeanie?'

'Maybe ye'll see him to-morrow.' The maid stooped and folded the white
shawl more carefully over the dame's breast, and smiled in protective
kindly fashion. She had a good heart and a womanly, motherly touch,
although many a mistress had called her wilful and pert.

There were times when the minister came and sat himself behind his
aunt's chair to watch and to listen. He was a meditative man, and wrote
many an essay upon modern theology, but here he found food for
meditation of another sort.

There was no being in the world that he reverenced as he had reverenced
this aged lady. In his childhood she had taught him to lisp the measures
of psalm and paraphrase; in his youth she had advised him with shrewdest
wisdom; in his ministerial life she had been to him a friend, always
holding before him a greater spiritual height to be attained, and
now---- He thought upon his uncle as he had known him, a very reverent
elder of the kirk, a man who had led a long and useful life, and to whom
this woman had rendered wifely devotion. He thought upon his cousins, in
whose lives their mother's life had seemed unalterably bound up. He
would at times emerge from his corner, and, sitting down beside the
lady, would take her well-worn Bible and read to her such passages as he
knew were graven deep upon her heart by scenes of joy or sorrow, parting
or meeting, or the very hours of birth or death, in the lives that had
been dearer to her than her own. He was not an emotional man, but yet
there was a ringing pathos in his voice as he read the rhythmic words.
At such times she would sit as if voice and rhythm soothed her, or she
would bow her head solemnly at certain pauses, as if accustomed to agree
to the sentiment expressed. Heart and thought were not awake to him, nor
to the book he read, nor to the memories he tried to arouse. The fire of
the lady's heart sprang up only for one word, that word a name, the name
of a man of whose very existence, it seemed, no trace was left in all
that country-side.

The minister would retreat out of the lady's range of vision; and so
great did his curiosity grow that he instigated the maid to ask certain
questions as she played at the game of the old love-stor