“You are tired, Colin, my boy?” he said.
“A bit, father, a bit,” I answered; “rough roads you know. I was landed at break of day at Skipness and—Is mother———?”
“Sit in, laochain! Did you meet many folks on the road?”
“No, sir; as pestilent barren a journey as ever I trotted on, and the people seemingly on the hill, for their crops are unco late in the field.”
“Ay, ay, lad, so they are,” said my father, pulling back his shoulders a bit—a fairly straight wiry old man, with a name for good swordsmanship in his younger days.
I was busy at a cold partridge, and hard at it, when I thought again how curious it was that my father should be a-foot in the house at such time of night and no one else about, he so early a bedder for ordinary and never the last to sneck the outer door.
“Did you expect any one, father,” I asked, “that you should be waiting up with the collation, and the outer door unsnecked?”
“There was never an outer door snecked since you left, Colin,” said he, turning awkwardly away and looking hard into the loof of his hand like a wife spaeing fortunes—for sheer want, I could see, of some engagement for his eyes. “I could never get away with the notion that some way like this at night would ye come back to Elngmore.”
“Mother would miss me?”
“She did, Colin, she did; I’m not denying.”