'Yes,' he was saying in his slow, quavering voice; it was weaker now than when Lucy last heard it faltering over those closing words in the Litany in the college chapel--'yes, I mind it quite well. I heard it when I was a boy standing at my mother's knee. She was a poor woman; she would have searched for it all night if she had lost a piece of silver, she would not have rested till she had found it. I was the youngest of all her sons, and when she read that chapter to me as a boy standing there, I used to think that I was the Prodigal, and that by-and-by, when I had wasted all my substance in a far country, I should come back like the Prodigal to my father's house, and ask to be taken in. I've been wanting to go back a long time, my dear; I'm getting tired and old, and I should like to go back. Do you think he would take me in?' 'We will see what the Prodigal's father did when he went back,' said the nurse; and then she read in her soft, slow, earnest voice the concluding words of the old, sweet story. Nurse Brannan had a wonderful power in reading God's Word, giving by tone and accent a new bearing to the familiar words of Scripture. Lucy had heard the words hundreds of times before, and had hurried over them in her scrambling way of reading her morning portion; but to-day they seemed to convey a special message. She stood there, behind the curtain, while Nurse Brannan read and the old Master listened. 'It seems very clear,' he said, when she had finished. 'It seems just as my mother said. I will arise and go to my Father--I have nowhere else to go--I have changed a good deal in all these years, but--but He would not be likely to change----' 'No,' said Nurse Brannan; 'He has not changed!' Lucy's tears were dropping fast; she could not trust herself to go in. She crept softly out of the room and shut the door, and went across the landing to Mrs. Rae's room. The Master's wife was always glad to see Lucy; she gave her better accounts of the Master than anyone else in the household. She looked up when Lucy came in, and noted with her failing eyes, instinctively sharpened by love, that Lucy had been crying. 'Have you seen the Master?' she asked, with a little catch in her voice. 'Yes, oh yes! he is better to-day, and giving the nurse quite a discourse upon the parables. You remember what lovely sermons he used to preach upon the parables?' The Master's wife smiled; she remembered every word of them. They were her comfort and stay now, those old sermons of the Master's; they made the way quite clear before her; they removed all the difficulties. She would have been shocked if she had known that that nurse from Addenbroke's had been so presumptuous as to attempt to explain the parables he knew so much about to the Master.