given me the First Bursary, father," said Robin.

No one spoke, but Robin saw tears running down his mother's face. John
Fordyce deliberately turned back several pages of the Bible.

"We will sing," he said in a clear voice, "in the Twenty-third
Psalm--the whole of it!--

'The Lord's my Shepherd, I'll not want----'"

* * * * *

The Psalms of David, as rendered into English verse by Nahum Tate and
others, are not remarkable for poetic merit; neither does the old
Scottish fashion of singing the same, seated and without accompaniment,
conduce to a concord of sweet sounds. But there are no tunes like old
tunes, and there are no hearts like full hearts. If ever a song went
straight up to heaven, the Twenty-third Psalm, borne up on the wings of
"Martyrdom," did so that night.

CHAPTER TWO.

INTRODUCES A PILLAR OF STATE AND THE APPURTENANCES THEREOF.

The time had undoubtedly arrived when I must have a Private Secretary.

Kitty, for one, insisted on it. She said that I was ruining my health in
the service of an ungrateful country, and added that she, personally,
declined to be left a widow at twenty-eight-and-a-half to oblige
anybody.

"It is exactly the wrong age," she said. "If it had happened four or
five years ago, I could have done pretty well for myself. Now, I should
be out of the running among the _debutantes_, and a little too young and
flighty to suit a middle-aged bachelor."

I may add that my wife does not often talk in this unfeeling manner. But
she suffers at times from a desire to live up to a sort of honorary
reputation for sprightly humour, conferred upon her by undiscriminating
admirers in the days before she became engaged to me. As a matter of
fact, her solicitude on my behalf was largely due to an ambition to see
a little paragraph in the newspapers, announcing that "Mr Adrian
Inglethwaite, M.P., Director of the Sub-Tropical and Arctic Department
at the Foreign Office, has appointed Mr Blankley Dash to be his Private
Secretary."

Dolly and Dilly seconded the motion. They had not the effrontery to wrap
up their motives in specious expressions of concern for my health, but
stated their point of view with brutal frankness, as is their wont. I
was an old dear, they conceded, and of course Kitty was Kitty; but a
sister and brother-in-law were, to put it quite plainly, a hopelessly
dull couple to live with: and the visits of Mesdames Dolly and Dilly to
ou