'Mother!' he said, and her eyelids rose at once. He stooped to kiss her, with the tears rolling down his face. The light of heaven broke and flashed from her aged countenance. She lifted her weak hands, took his head, and held it to her bosom.
'Eh! the bonnie gray heid!' she said, and burst into a passion of weeping. She had kept some tears for the last. Now she would spend all that her griefs had left her. But there came a pause in her sobs, though not in her weeping, and then she spoke.
'I kent it a' the time, O Lord. I kent it a' the time. He's come hame. My Anerew, my Anerew! I'm as happy 's a bairn. O Lord! O Lord!'
And she burst again into sobs, and entered paradise in radiant weeping.
Her hands sank away from his head, and when her son gazed in her face he saw that she was dead. She had never looked at Robert.
The two men turned towards each other. Robert put out his arms. His father laid his head on his bosom, and went on weeping. Robert held him to his heart.
When shall a man dare to say that God has done all he can?
CHAPTER XIX. THE WHOLE STORY.
The men laid their mother's body with those of the generations that had gone before her, beneath the long grass in their country churchyard near Rothieden—a dreary place, one accustomed to trim cemeteries and sentimental wreaths would call it—to Falconer's mind so friendly to the forsaken dust, because it lapt it in sweet oblivion.