“And you will forgive me, Allison, and—trust me?”
“I will ay trust you. And it is you who need to forgive me,” said she, holding out her hand. “But it never came into my mind—”
John held her hand firmly for a moment.
“Allison!” said he, and then he turned and went away.
It was his mother who should befriend Allison Bain. But how to tell her story? If it had to be told, Allison must tell it herself. As to speaking with Saunners Crombie about Allison Bain and her troubles—
John uttered an angry word, and hurried down the lane and past the gardens and the green, and over the fields and over the hills, till he came to himself standing in the moonlight within sight of the “Stanin’ Stanes.” And being there he could only turn and go home again, carrying his troubled thoughts with him.
He had many of them, and the thought which pressed upon him most painfully for the moment was one which need not have troubled him at all. How was he to meet his mother and speak to her about Allison Bain with all this angry turmoil in his heart? He was angry with himself, with Crombie, even with Allison.
“How could I have thought—” she had said, looking at him with entreaty in her lovely eyes. While she had been in his thoughts by day and in his dreams by night, he “had never come into her mind!”
“But I could have made her think of me if I had not been a fool, with my fine plans about rising in the world! I could make her care for me yet,” said John to himself, quite unconscious that from the window of her room his mother’s kind, anxious eyes were watching him.
“Something has happened to vex him,” said she to herself. “I will not seem to spy upon him. He will tell me, if he needs my help, in his own time.”