Allison Bain; Or, By a Way She Knew Not

by Margaret M. Robertson

“At any rate, I will have it out with my mother to-night,” said he.

He was standing, when he came to this resolve, on the very spot where he first caught sight of Allison Bain. It was the second time he had stood there since that day, for no reason that he could have told to any one. He had come to the spot in the early morning after that first sleepless night. He needed a walk to stretch his legs, which were rather stiff after the long tramp of yesterday, he told his mother, when he came home to the breakfast he had kept waiting, and he told himself that he only chanced to take that road rather than another.

He said nothing about it to Robert Hume. They had the night before agreed to take an early walk together. Robin was late; but happily, as he thought, he caught sight of John as he was disappearing over the first hilltop, and followed with no thought of finding himself in the way.

But when he came to the head of the last hillock, and saw John standing where he had stood the day before, “looking at nothing,” as Robin told his mother afterward, he was seized with sudden

shamefaced-ness, and turning, shot like an arrow down the brae.

John had been less at the manse than he usually was while visiting his mother. He was to go there in the evening, and he must speak to his mother before he said anything about his half-formed plans to the minister or Mrs Hume, as he came home fully intending to do. So he turned homeward on the last afternoon; and as he walked he was saying to himself, with indignant contempt of his indecision, that after all he must be a poor creature, a fool, though he had never been in the way of thinking so till now.

“Well, John lad,” said his mother, looking up as he came in.

Her little maid had gone home for the day, and Mrs Beaton was sitting in her arm-chair “just waiting,” as she said.

It was a nice little room. A bright fire burned in the grate, and a shining tea-kettle was steaming on the hob. The carpet on the floor was faded and worn, and the furniture was of the plainest; but there were a few pretty things in the room to brighten it, and over the mantel-piece was a portrait of John’s father, “taken at his best.” For some strange reason, which he himself did not understand, John paused at the door, and looked up at the strong, good face.