softly to herself as she followed the sound of her brother's
voice echoing back through the glen.

CHAPTER EIGHT.

THE PRODIGAL'S RETURN.

"I have stayed too late. They'll be wondering what has kept me," said
Archie to himself, as he saw the firelight gleaming from the
cottage-window. "I wonder where Lily can be, that she didn't come to
meet me? I wonder if anything has happened?"

Something had happened. He paused a moment at the door to listen, as a
strange voice reached his ear. It was a man's voice. Going in softly,
he saw his aunt in her accustomed seat, and close beside her, with his
head bowed down on his hands, sat a stranger. There was a strange look,
too, on his aunt's face, the boy thought, and the tears were running
down over her cheeks. Wondering and anxious, he silently approached
her.

"Archie, are you come home?" said she, holding out her hand to him as he
drew near. "Hugh, this is your uncle's son. Archie, this is your
cousin Hugh come home again."

With a cry Archie sprang forward--not to take his cousin's offered hand,
but to clasp him round the neck; and, trembling like a leaf, the
returned wanderer held him in a close embrace.

"I knew you would come back," said Archie at last through his tears. "I
always told Lilias you would be sure to come back again.--Oh, Aunt
Janet, are you not glad?--And you'll never go away again? Oh, I was
sure you would come home soon!"

Even his mother had not received her prodigal without some questioning,
and the sudden clasping of Archie's arms about his neck, the perfect
trust of the child's heart, was like balm to the remorseful tortures of
Hugh Blair, and great drops from the man's eyes mingled with the boy's
happy tears.

"Archie," said his aunt after a little time, "who spoke to you of your
cousin Hugh?"

"Oh, many a one," answered Archie, as he gently stroked his cousin's
hair. "Donald Ross, and the Muirlands shepherds, and Mrs Stirling."
And then he added, in a hushed voice, "Lilias heard you speak his name
in your prayers often, when you thought her sleeping."

Hugh Blair groaned in bitterness of spirit. The thought of his mother's
sleepless nights of prayer for him revealed more of the agony of all
those years of waiting than her lips could ever utter. He thought of
this night and that in his career of reckless folly, and said to
himself: "It may have been then or there that my name was on her lips.
O God, judge me not in Thin