In the meantime John was on the sands, facing the wind, which drowned his voice as he sang:
“Will I like a fule, quo’ he,
For a haughty hizzie dee?”
But it was not the wind which silenced his song, for Allison Bain was no “haughty hizzie” of the sort, “Who frown to lead a lover on,” but a sad and solitary woman, who might have a sorrowful life before her.
“To whom may the Lord be kind!” said John, with a softened heart. “I love her, and it is no sin to love her, since I may never see her face again.”
And many more thoughts he had which might not so well bear the telling; and all the time Robin was bawling into his inattentive ears an account of a battle of words which had taken place between two of his friends, who had agreed, since neither would acknowledge defeat, to make him umpire to decide between them.
When they, turned their backs to the wind and their faces homeward, hearing and answering became possible. They had the matter decided to their own satisfaction before they reached the house, and their merry sparring and laughter, and the evidence they gave of an excellent appetite when supper-time came, might have been reassuring to Mrs Beaton, even had she been more anxious than she was about her son.
After that John was more careful of his looks and words and ways, when in his mother’s presence. All tokens of weariness or preoccupation or depression were kept out of her sight; and, indeed, at all times he felt the necessity of struggling against the dullness and the indifference to most things, even to his work, which were growing upon him.
He did his best against it, or he thought he did so. He forced himself to read as usual, and when he “could make nothing of it,” he took long walks in all weathers, so as to keep his “helplessness” out of his mother’s sight, believing that when the necessity for exertion should be over—when he could get out of the groove into which it would have perhaps been better that he had never put himself, all would be as it had been before. And said he grimly:
“If the worse comes to the worst, I can but fall to breaking stones again.”
It ended, as it generally does end, when a man sets himself to do the work of two men, or to do in six months the work of twelve, in order to gratify a vain ambition, or to lighten a heavy heart. It took no more than a slight cold, so it was thought to be at first, to bring the struggle to an end, and the work of the winter.