He accepted my thanks with indifference, but blushed in a gratified manner when Kitty addressed him. He was her bond-slave by the time that we bade him farewell at Perth. I presented him with my card, which he carefully placed inside the lining of his hat; but he forbore, either from native caution or excessive shyness, to furnish us with any information as to his own identity.
Well, here he was, sitting opposite to me in the Reading Room of the British Museum, and seemingly none too prosperous. Six years ago he had looked like a young and healthy farm lad. Now, fourth-rate journalism was stamped all over him.
[CHAPTER THREE.]
"ANENT."
We conversed awhile in whispers to avoid disturbing the other worshippers—I always feel like that in the British Museum—and finally abandoned our respective tasks and issued forth together. With a little persuasion I prevailed upon my companion to come and lunch with me, and we repaired to a rather old-fashioned and thoroughly British establishment close by, where the fare is solid and the "portions" generous.
My guest, after a brief effort at self-repression, fell upon the food in a fashion that told me a far more vivid tale of his present circumstances than the most lengthy explanation could have done. When he was full I gave him a cigar, and he leaned back in his padded arm-chair and surveyed me with the nearest approach to emotion that I have ever observed in the countenance of a Scot.
"I was wanting that," he remarked frankly, and he smiled largely upon me. He was looking less gaunt now, and the rugged lines of his face were tinged with a more healthy colour. He was a handsome youth, I noticed, with shrewd grey eyes and a chin that stood out like the ram of a battle-ship.
He told me all about himself, some of which has been set down here already. He had done well at Edinburgh University, and, having obtained his Arts degree, was on the point of settling down to study for the ministry—the be-all and end-all of the hope of a humble Scottish household—when disaster came tumbling upon his family. His brother David fell sick in his lungs, and the doctor prescribed a sojourn in a drier climate for at least a year.
The next part of the narrative was rather elliptical; but from the fact that money was immediately forthcoming to send David abroad, and that Robin had simultaneously given up his work in Edinburgh and returned home to help his father about the farm, I gathered that a life's ambition had been voluntarily sacrificed on the altar of family duty. Anyhow, when David returned, marvellously and mercifully restored to health, setting his younger brother free once more, two precious years had flown; so that Robin now found himself, at the age of twenty-three, faced with the alternative of making a fresh start in life or remaining on the farm at home, that most pathetic and forlorn of failures, a "stickit minister." The family exchequer had been depleted by David's illness, and Robin, rather than draw any further on the vanishing little store of pound-notes in the cupboard behind the kitchen chimney, determined to go to London and turn his education to some account.