“Why, Mrs McGregor, do you make that distinction? You talk of your husband’s death, but always speak of poor Harvey’s loss.”
“Because, Mr Smith, I saw my husband die; my son went away, and ah! foolish though it may be, I cherish half a hope he may yet return to close his mother’s eyes.”
“Well, well, I daresay stranger things may have happened,” said the solicitor, thoughtfully looking and pretending to read a fortune in the grounds of his tea-cup.
Now, the fact is, that no sooner had Harvey McGregor left Mr Steve’s than he had hurried up to town, and called on Mr Smith, the only man-at-law he knew. He speedily convinced that gentleman of his identity, and got his mother’s address. Heedless Harvey would have hurried away home—as he called it—at once, but wise Mr Smith would not hear of it.
“Come a day after me,” he had advised. “I’ll go down and break the news, for, don’t you know, my boy, that joy can kill?”
Hence Mr Smith’s present visit to the old castle.
“Whose fortune are you trying to read in that tea-cup?” said Mrs McGregor, with a strange ring in her voice, a strange sparkle in her eye. “Give me the cup,” she added.
She turned it round and round.
“I see,” she said; “my boy’s barques sailing everywhere over the world. Sometimes they are wrecked, but he is never drowned. I see the prows of these ships pointing everywhere, but never homeward. My boy is proud. Ah I at last here comes one, and my boy, my boy is in it!”
She almost dashed down the cup as she spoke, and sprang to her feet. “Smith,” she cried, “you cannot deceive me; there is something in my breast, born of a mother’s love, that tells me Harvey has come.”