They did not ask Jock if he would remain for evening worship. "The stranger within the gate" was assumed to be, for the time, a member of the household. It was for him to renounce his recognised right, not for the family to question it. But Jock never even argued the point with himself. He listened with head bent down as if ashamed to hold it up, and following the example set to him by the family, knelt down--for the first time in his life--in prayer. Did he pray? Was it all a mere form? Was it by constraint, and not willingly? What his thoughts were on such an occasion, or whether they were gathered up in prayer to the living God, who can tell? But if the one thought even, for the first time, possessed him, that maybe there was a Person beyond the seen and temporal, to whom the world and man belonged, whose Name he could now associate with no evil but with all good, who possibly knew him and wished him to be good like Himself;--if there was even a glimmer in his soul, as he knelt down, that he might say as well as others, and along with them, "Our Father, which art in Heaven", then was there cast into his heart, though he knew it not, the germ of a new life which might yet grow into a faith and love which would be life eternal. The prayer of Hugh the keeper was simple, earnest, and direct, a real utterance from one person to another--yet as from a man to God, couched in his own homely dialect to Him whom the people of every language and tongue can worship. The prayer was naturally suggested by the chapter which was read. He acknowledged that all were as lost sheep; as money lost in the dust of earth; as miserable prodigals lost to their Father and to themselves, and who were poor and needy, feeding on husks, having no satisfaction, and finding no man to give unto them. He prayed God to bring them all into the fold of the Good Shepherd, who had given His life for the sheep, and to keep them in it; to gather them as the lost coins into the treasury of Him who was rich, yet who for our sakes became poor; he prayed God to help them all to say, "I will arise and go to my Father", in the assured hope that their Father would meet them afar off, and receive them with joy. After remembering the afflicted in body and mind, the orphan and widow, the outcast and stranger, he asked that God, who had mercy on themselves who deserved nothing, would make them also merciful to others; and he concluded with the Lord’s Prayer. Had any one seen poor Hall that night as he lay in the hay-loft, a clean blanket under him and more than one over him, they might have discovered in his open eyes, and heard in his half-muttered expressions, and noticed even from his wakeful tossings to and fro, a something stirring in his soul the nature or value of which he himself could not comprehend or fully estimate. CHAPTER XVIII THE KEEPER’S LETTER