"robbie waited on him" ([p. 329]).
Mrs. MacDougall laughed. "He's just a well-to-do tradesman, though he had mighty fine airs when he used to come to Dunster; but I never liked the looks of him. He broke his poor wife's heart, and never believed it till she lay dead, and then he was sorry, and tried to make some amends. He was a bit touched when he saw his motherless bairns, and did a kind deed when he sent them to me; but he soon grew blithe and gay again, and troubled his head no more. I've never heard from him from that day to this, except that he sends me payment for the babies still. He doesn't even know that the little one died, for he has never written; and I don't know where he is; but any day he may come, and just take it into his head to fetch poor Nannie's bairn away from me: but I hope he won't, for now that he's married again and has many children, as I am told, poor Robbie will be ill-welcomed among them."
What a different tale this was from the one Elsie had concocted in her own mind! How utterly foolish and ashamed she was feeling. She would tell all, and would so ease her mind.
"Mother," she said, speaking quickly, "it was all through a letter I picked up and read, and because I always thought Robbie was your favourite more than me and Duncan. I thought he must be your little boy, and that we were not. You did buy Robbie more things, and never sent him for the milk."
"Ye're right enough, Elsie," Mrs. MacDougall said, with a sigh. "There's many a time, when I've been sore pressed, I've been tempted to take the money that Robbie's father sent to buy the clothes you and Duncan were in need of; but I've always stood against it, and never spent a penny of that money for any other purpose than the right one, and I've taken care of the child more jealously than if he was my own. But the Evil One himself must have put it in your heart to be jealous of that poor little lad. With all my care, I doubt that he'll ever see manhood. And as for the letter, I think I know the one you mean. If you found it, you'd no call to read it."
"But I read it, and I kept it," Elsie confessed, seeing that her mother had quite failed to comprehend all that she had tried to tell her. "It was for that I wanted to run away—to go and find who I thought was our own father—and I took Duncan with me. I thought it would be easy. I didn't mean to hurt Duncan."
"I will be no harsh to you, Elsie," Mrs. MacDougall said, sorrowfully. "It's a sore thing for a mother to think of; but God has taught you His lesson in His own way. I doubt you'll never do the like again."
It was only by degrees that Mrs. MacDougall heard the whole history of the children's wanderings, or Elsie fully understood the terrible dangers to which she had, by her own act, willingly exposed herself and Duncan. Never had she fully realised what the word "home" meant until returning to it, after having been homeless, lonely, and outcast, she was received with the glad welcome that no one else in all the wide world would have extended to her.
Mrs. MacDougall was, like many of her race, a woman of few words, and not given to demonstrations of affection, yet with a deeply-rooted, fervent feeling of attachment to her own flesh and blood that nothing could destroy, that was only equalled by her strong sense of religious duty. In that terrible week of suspense, when she received no tidings of the missing children, her hair had become grey, and her face aged by many years. In seeking them out, she had spent unhesitatingly the hardly-scraped savings of years, laid by for the decent burying of her old mother and herself. These facts spoke more strongly than words. Even Elsie knew well enough the terrible degradation an honest, respectable Scottish woman would feel it that any of her birth and kin should fall upon the charity of strangers.