As they entered the room where the people were gathered, Donald Ross was reading the hundred and third psalm, and the words of love and pity and sympathy were dropping from his kindly lips like healing balm upon the mourning hearts, and as they rose and fell upon the cadences of “Coleshill,” the tune Straight Rory always chose for this psalm, the healing sank down into all the sore places, and the peace that passeth understanding began to take possession of them. Softly and sweetly they sang, the old women swaying with the music: “For, as the heaven in its height The earth surmounteth far, So great to those that do him fear, His tender mercies are.” When they reached that verse, the mother took up the song and went bravely on through the words of the following verse: “As far as east is distant from The west, so far hath he From us removed, in his love, All our iniquity.” As she sang the last words her hand stole over to Bella, who sat beside her quiet but tearless, looking far away. But when the next words rose on the dear old minor strains, “Such pity as a father hath Unto his children dear,” Bella's lip began to tremble, and two big tears ran down her pale cheeks, and one could see that the sore pain in her heart had been a little eased. After Donald Ross had finished his part of the “exercises,” he called upon Kenny Crubach, who read briefly, and without comment, the exquisite Scottish paraphrase of Luther's “little gospel”: “Behold the amazing gift of love The Father hath bestowed On us, the sinful sons of men, To call us sons of God--” and so on to the end. All this time Peter McRae, the man of iron, had been sitting with hardening face, his eyes burning in his head like glowing coals; and when Donald Ross called upon him for “some words of exhortation and comfort suitable to the occasion,” without haste and without hesitation the old man rose, and trembling with excitement and emotion, he began abruptly: “An evil spirit has been whispering to me, as to the prophet of old, 'Speak that which is good,' but the Lord hath delivered me from mine enemy, and my answer is, 'As the Lord liveth, what the Lord said unto me, that will I speak'; and it is not easy.” As the old man paused, a visible terror fell upon all the company assembled. The poor mother sat looking at him with the look of one shrinking from a blow, while Bella Peter's face expressed only startled fear.