"She 's at home." Tom Lindsay put himself in Robertson's way. "And, now, listen to me—"
The red-bearded man shoved Tom aside as though he were a troublesome bush in the path.
"Will you get to hell out o' my way," he roared, "afore I gi'e you a clout on the lug?"
He started at breakneck speed down the street. The brother looked after him silently, his jaw loose with wonder.
He pushed aside the little gate in front of the garden and though he knocked at the door, he tried it, so impatient was he for entry, and finding it on the latch, he opened it as a gust of wind might. In the hall he met her coming to answer the knock, and suddenly as he saw her, all the bluster and the heartiness went out of him, and his knees turned to water and there was a great catch in his throat. He wanted to see her only, but the baby she had on her arm was she also, both of them one. It suddenly occurred to him that he too was a part of her, all three of them one. And he felt suddenly as Saul must have felt when, going toward Damascus, he was stricken to the earth.
She smiled at his perturbation. "I 'm glad to see you, Aleck." Calmly she shifted the child to her left arm. She put out her hand to him and he caught it and held on to it as a foundering sailor hangs on to a thrown line. She led him to the parlor.
"Have you no word," she smiled, "for me and this wee fellow o' yours?"
He looked at the both of them, she more like Ceres, the autumn spirit, than ever, buxom and wise and calmly happy, and the little thing of down and fluttering life in her arms, soft as a newly hatched chick, he sensed.
"When," he asked, and his voice in his own ears was hoarse as the cawing of a rook, "when are you going to marry me?"
"I 'm no' so sure," she said calmly, "that I 'm going to marry you at all."