This had been said in faint slow utterances, so low that Bobus could hardly have heard a couple of feet further off, and with intervals between, and there was a gesture of tender perfect content in the contact with him that went to his heart, and, before he was aware, a great hot tear came dropping down on Jock’s forehead and caused an exclamation.
“I beg your pardon,” said Bobus. “Oh! Jock, you don’t know what it is to find you like this. I came with so much to ask and talk of to you.”
Jock looked up inquiringly.
“You were right to suppress that paper of mine,” continued Bobus, “I wouldn’t have written it now. I have seen better what a people are without Christianity, be the code what it may, and the civilisation, it can’t produce such women as my mother, no, nor such men as you, Jockey, my boy,” he muttered much lower.
“Are you coming back, dear old man?” said Jock, with eyes fixed on him.
“I don’t know. Tell me one thing, old man: I always thought, when you took to using your brains and getting up physical science, that you must get beyond what satisfied you as a soldier. Now, have the two, science and religion, never clashed, or have you kept them apart?”
“They’ve worked in together,” said Jock.
“You don’t say so because you ought, and think it good for me?”
“As if I could, lying here. ‘All Thy works praise Thee, O God, and Thy saints do magnify Thee.’”
Bobus was not sure whether this were a conscious reply, or only wandering, and his mother here came in, wakened by the murmur of voices.