Whereat I fell into a storm of dissent, half in excitement, half in anger, as though my son had been accused already. I fear I spoke words harsh and unreasonable, but my defense must be that I was all unstrung with sudden grief and fear. Till by and by I was as violent in my demand for his father's consent as I had been in denial of my own, so strange are the cross-currents that trouble a woman's heart.

But we might as well have all been silent, so far as any effect on Harold was concerned. He had promised and he was going—and that was the end of it. So the outcome of the whole matter was a kind of tacit agreement, before we parted for the night, that Harold was to have his way.

When Gordon and I were in our own room, the door tightly shut, I pleaded with him to accept a plan that my poor bewildered mind had conjured up. "Let me write to uncle," was the burden of my cry; "if our boy is leaving us because we're not able to support him, uncle could change all that; he could at least undertake to complete his education—and I know he will, I know he will."

But Gordon's face was like marble. In the last appeal a Scotchman is always Scotch—and I knew Gordon was thinking of that last night when he had been all but turned from uncle's door. "Not while we have a crust to eat or a hand to toil," he said, in a tone so low and resolute that I actually feared to press my argument with another word; "no child of mine shall be dependent on his father's enemy;" which language smote me to the heart—nor do I think Gordon would have uttered it in a calmer mood.

Before we put out the light, his face still white and drawn, he took me by the hand and led me towards the bed. We knelt and prayed together—but my heart was bleeding. And anyhow—it is hard to write it down—Gordon and I didn't seem so close together now, when we prayed, as we once had been. I had the phantom feeling that we prayed apart. He had beckoned me, years before, in to faith's Holy Place where the Divine Saviour waited for us both; I had faltered in, groping for the way, bringing a broken and contrite heart—and I had found my husband gone.

It was the deep dark before the dawn when I slipped noiselessly into Harold's room—and I prayed beside his bed. I loved to hear him breathing; and I wondered if God could hear me—my soul, I mean, half panting in its loneliness.

XXIII
"THE VOICE OF RACHEL"

When I began this chapter it was with the purpose of telling about grandfather's home-going. But not to his beloved Scotland, of whose heathery hills he seemed to think more fondly and speak more longingly as the years went by. It never lost its charm for us, this loving talk of the old Scotch shepherd about the far-off hills and valleys of his native land; even I, who had never been near them at all, came to be quite familiar with those sunlit slopes, their glistening heather, their babbling springs, their bleating flocks that roamed from base to brow. No, not to Bonnie Scotland—as he fondly called it—but to a fairer clime, did the weary shepherd turn his face at last.

But before I come to this I must tell of something else; something I would to God might be left unrecorded, for my pen is aching while I write. But this other—what I am about to tell—had its own part, I think, in starting dear old grandfather on the long journey from which he will return no more. For it is about Harold, who was grandfather's idol, as I have already said.