Gavin knocked at the door of the surgery, but entered without waiting for a response. McQueen was no longer stamping through the room, red and furious. He had even laid aside his pipe. He was sitting back in his chair, looking half-mournfully, half-contemptuously, at something in his palm. His hand closed instinctively when he heard the door open, but Gavin had seen that the object was an open locket.
“It was only your reference to the thing,” the detected doctor said, with a grim laugh, “that made me open it. Forty years ago, sir, I——Phew! it is forty-two years, and I have not got over it yet.” He closed the locket with a snap. “I hope you have come back, Dishart, to speak more rationally?”
Gavin told him why he had come back, and the doctor said he was a fool for his pains.
“Is it useless, Dishart, to make another appeal to you?”
“Quite useless, doctor,” Gavin answered, promptly. “My mind is made up at last.”
Chapter Twenty-One.
NIGHT—MARGARET—FLASHING OF A LANTERN.
That evening the little minister sat silently in his parlour. Darkness came, and with it weavers rose heavy-eyed from their looms, sleepy children sought their mothers, and the gate of the field above the manse fell forward to let cows pass to their byre; the great Bible was produced in many homes, and the ten o’clock bell clanged its last word to the night. Margaret had allowed the lamp to burn low. Thinking that her boy slept, she moved softly to his side and spread her shawl over his knees. He had forgotten her. The doctor’s warnings scarcely troubled him. He was Babbie’s lover. The mystery of her was only a veil hiding her from other men, and he was looking through it upon the face of his beloved.
It was a night of long ago, but can you not see my dear Margaret still as she bends over her son? Not twice in many days dared the minister snatch a moment’s sleep from grey morning to midnight, and, when this did happen, he jumped up by-and-by in shame, to revile himself for an idler and ask his mother wrathfully why she had not tumbled him out of his chair? To-night Margaret was divided between a desire to let him sleep and a fear of his self-reproach when he awoke; and so, perhaps, the tear fell that roused him.