e. They stood forth on the cold earth with a trenchancy of
contrast; and he was struck with a sense of incompleteness in the day,
the season, and the beauty that surrounded him--the chill there was in
the warmth, the gross black clods about the opening primroses, the damp
earthy smell that was everywhere intermingled with the scents. The voice
of the aged Torrance within rose in an ecstasy. And he wondered if
Torrance also felt in his old bones the joyous influence of the spring
morning; Torrance, or the shadow of what once was Torrance, that must
come so soon to lie outside here in the sun and rain with all his
rheumatisms, while a new minister stood in his room and thundered from
his own familiar pulpit? The pity of it, and something of the chill of
the grave, shook him for a moment as he made haste to enter.

He went up the aisle reverently, and took his place in the pew with
lowered eyes, for he feared he had already offended the kind old
gentleman in the pulpit, and was sedulous to offend no further. He could
not follow the prayer, not even the heads of it. Brightnesses of azure,
clouds of fragrance, a tinkle of falling water and singing birds, rose
like exhalations from some deeper, aboriginal memory, that was not his,
but belonged to the flesh on his bones. His body remembered; and it
seemed to him that his body was in no way gross, but ethereal and
perishable like a strain of music; and he felt for it an exquisite
tenderness as for a child, an innocent, full of beautiful instincts and
destined to an early death. And he felt for old Torrance--of the many
supplications, of the few days--a pity that was near to tears. The
prayer ended. Right over him was a tablet in the wall, the only ornament
in the roughly masoned chapel--for it was no more; the tablet
commemorated, I was about to say the virtues, but rather the existence
of a former Rutherford of Hermiston; and Archie, under that trophy of
his long descent and local greatness, leaned back in the pew and
contemplated vacancy with the shadow of a smile between playful and sad,
that became him strangely. Dandie's sister, sitting by the side of Clem
in her new Glasgow finery, chose that moment to observe the young laird.
Aware of the stir of his entrance, the little formalist had kept her
eyes fastened and her face prettily composed during the prayer. It was
not hypocrisy, there was no one further from a hypocrite. The girl had
been taught to behave: to look up, to l