“It might very well be, and I might live to see it. There’s more land to be had too, if I’m willing to pay the price for it—and with this in view I might care to do it. I’ll do nothing in haste.”
He seemed to be speaking to himself, rather than to her.
“I’ll do nothing in haste,” he repeated. “But I could do it, and there would be some good in life—if this thing could be.”
“Are ye forgetting that ye ha’e a son somewhere in the world?” said his sister gravely.
Mr Dawson uttered a sound in which pain and impatience seemed to mingle.
“Have I? It is hardly to be hoped. And if he is—living—it is hardly such a life as would fit him to take his place where—he might have been. I think, Jean, it might be as weel to act as if I had no living son.”
“But yet he may be living, and he may come home.” Mr Dawson rose suddenly and went and leaned against the darkening window.
“No, Jean, if he had ever been coming home, he would have come ere now. He was seen in Portie not three months since, and he never came near me. Ye think I was hard on him; but I wasna so hard as all that.”
“Who saw him?” asked his sister greatly startled. “He was seen by more than one, though he was little like himself, if I can judge from what I heard.”
“But he is living, George. There’s comfort in that.”