MacLachan, the dour, turned away. Nelson set a hand on his arm, but he struck it down.
“Oh, Jim-boy!” whispered the girl to her husband. “I can't let him go again.”
He was a youth of resource, that husband; I'm not prepared to say that he didn't have even a touch of genius. “Granddad!” he said.
“Eh?” MacLachan stopped, as if stricken in his tracks.
“What do you think of her?” Jim-boy had produced, quick as conjuring, a little leather-mounted photograph which he held up before MacLachan's eyes. “Did Meg look like her when she was a baby?”
“The varra spit an' image,” cried MacLachan, reverting to his broadest Scotch. Then, with a cry that shook him: “My bairnie!”
Meg went to his arms in a leap.
“And you may believe it or not—I would not, on the oath of a chaplain if I had not seen it with my own eyes,” ran Captain Nelson's subsequent narrative to Our Square, “but I saw the tears on those twin gray rocks that serve MacLachan for cheeks. So I drifted down to leeward and gathered my coat and gave three waiters a quarter each for not staring and came away to tell you. And you'll forgive me for waking the two of you up, and it gone eight bells—I mean midnight—but that was Mac's last word as I left, that I was to tell you. He said you'd be glad.”
Glad we were, and all Our Square joined in the gladness, for it was a changed and softened MacLachan that came back to us, sober and strangely, gently awkward, the next day after a night spent with “my family.”
“Ye'll not see me drink-taken again,” he promised the Little Red Doctor.