“It was not for his sermon. I heard him preach that sermon after, and I just listened, minding yon afternoon. But there was not a word in it about taking your bill, and writing fourscore.”
“Oh, Rodie, you couldn’t remember it as well as all that!”
“Why shouldn’t I remember? I was a big laddie. I remember heaps of things. I mind going to Kinghorn, and crossing in the smack to Leith, years and years before.”
“That was different from hearing a sermon,” said Elsie, with the superiority to sermons which a minister’s daughter naturally possessed.
“I did mind it, however,” said Rodie, “and I knew it was not in the sermon—then where was it? and what was it for? I mind, as if it were yesterday, about taking the bill, and writing fourscore. Now, the question is,” said the young man, laying down the tongs, and gazing unwinking into the glowing abyss of the fire, “what did my father mean by yon? He did not mean just nothing at all. You would not say that.”
“I do not suppose,” said Elsie, with a woman’s quick and barely justified partisanship, “that my father ever said anything that meant just nothing at all.”
“Oh yes, he does, whiles,” said the more impartial boy; “but this was different. What did he mean by it? I will tell you what I have been thinking. Yon gomeril of a Frank has got it into his thick head that everybody in St. Rule’s is in his debt. It is his mother that has put it into his head. Now, just supposing, for the sake of the argument, that it was true——”
“I think,” said Elsie, thoughtfully, “that maybe it was true.”
“Well, then,” said Rodie, “we’ll suppose that papa” (into this babyish title they all fell by moments, though protesting against it) “knew all about it. He generally does know about most things; people put a great deal of trust in him. They tell him things. Now, my opinion is, that old Mr. Anderson told him all about this, and who the folk were, and how they were to pay.”
“Maybe,” said Elsie, doubtfully.