My reader can hardly avoid thinking it was a poor sad triumph that Robert had after all. How the dreams of the boy had dwindled in settling down into the reality! He had his father, it was true, but what a father! And how little he had him!
But this was not the end; and Robert always believed that the end must be the greater in proportion to the distance it was removed, to give time for its true fulfilment. And when he prayed aloud beside his father, I doubt not that his thanksgiving and his hope were equal.
The prayer over, he took his father's hand and led him down again to the little parlour, and they took their seats again by the fire; and Robert began again and went on with his story, not omitting the parts belonging to Mary St. John and Eric Ericson.
When he came to tell how he had encountered him in the deserted factory:
'Luik here, father, here's the mark o' the cut,' he said, parting the thick hair on the top of his head.
His father hid his face in his hands.
'It wasna muckle o' a blow that ye gied me, father,' he went on, 'but I fell against the grate, and that was what did it. And I never tellt onybody, nae even Miss St. John, wha plaistered it up, hoo I had gotten 't. And I didna mean to say onything aboot it; but I wantit to tell ye a queer dream, sic a queer dream it garred me dream the same nicht.'
As he told the dream, his father suddenly grew attentive, and before he had finished, looked almost scared; but he said nothing. When he came to relate his grandmother's behaviour after having discovered that the papers relating to the factory were gone, he hid his face in his hands once more. He told him how grannie had mourned and wept over him, from the time when he heard her praying aloud as he crept through her room at night to their last talk together after Dr. Anderson's death. He set forth, as he could, in the simplest language, the agony of her soul over her lost son. He told him then about Ericson, and Dr. Anderson, and how good they had been to him, and at last of Dr. Anderson's request that he would do something for him in India.
'Will ye gang wi' me, father?' he asked.
'I'll never leave ye again, Robert, my boy,' he answered. 'I have been a bad man, and a bad father, and now I gie mysel' up to you to mak the best o' me ye can. I daurna leave ye, Robert.'