They could hear what he said then--all the familiar petitions--the daily prayers in which the godly peasant, ever since he first knelt down at his own fire-side, had remembered before God his church, his country, and the authorities ordained in each--had their place first in the old man’s evening supplications; and last of all, with his voice then shriller and more broken than ever, and his hard, withered, toil-worn hands convulsively strained together, there came the soul and essence of the old man’s prayer,--“If he is yet within the land of the living, and the place of hope; if he is still on praying ground;” terrible anguish of entreaty over which that “if” threw its doubt and gloom. Mr Oswald turned away his face from the quick scrutiny of Hope; the one vehement strong man understood the other, but the banker felt himself abashed and humiliated before the intenser, sublimer, and less selfish spirit: “People do not die of broken hearts.” The young ladies and the young gentlemen rarely do; but George Oswald discovered, in the stillness of his own awed soul that night, how solemn a thing a broken heart is, and how the strongest might die of that rending, or more terrible, might live. By and by they entered. The old man was sitting in a homely elbow chair covered with blue and white checked linen. The bed which occupied one end of the room was decently curtained with the same material. The house was only a but and a ben; an outer and an inner apartment, but everything in it was very neatly arranged and clean. Poor Mrs Delvie’s “redding up” was done very mechanically now; her hands went about it, while her mind was far otherwise occupied, but still the kitchen was “redd up.” She sat in another elbow chair opposite her husband. She was a sensible, kindly, good house-mother, and would have been noticeable in any other connection, but the fervent, strong, passionate old man threw his gentler wife into the shade; and even her sufferings for the lost son, whose name through all these weary months she could mention under her own roof only in her prayers, were dimmed in presence of the intense and terrible love of the father. She looked very old and tremulous as she sat there shaking in her chair, and wiping her withered cheek with her apron. Saunders also had some heavy moisture veiling the almost fierce light that burned in his eye, and the old man trembled too with the wild earnestness of his passionate appeal to God. Mr Oswald entered with a shy inquiry after Saunders’ health.