taircase.

But the old woman was there before him. "Na! Na!" she cried. "Come in by
and eat something first."

But Thomas shook his head. It seemed to him at that moment as if he
never could eat or sleep again, the disillusion was so bitter, his
disappointment so keen.

"You will na? Then haste ye--haste ye. But it's a peety you wadna ha'e
eaten something. Ye'll need it, laddie; ye'll need it."

"Thomas! Thomas!" wailed the voice.

He tore himself away. He forced himself to go upstairs, following the
cry, which at every moment grew louder. At the top he cast a final
glance below. The old woman stood at the stair-foot, shading the candle
from the draught with a hand that shook with something more than age.
She was gazing after him in vague affright, and with the shadow of this
fear darkening her weazen face, formed a picture from which he was glad
to escape.

Plunging on, he found himself before a window whose small panes dripped
and groaned under a rain that was fast becoming a torrent. Chilled by
the sight, he turned toward the door faintly outlined beside it, and in
the semi-darkness seized an old-fashioned latch rattling in the wind
that permeated every passageway, and softly raised it.

Instantly the door fell back, and two eyes blazing with fever and that
fire of the soul of which fever is the mere physical symbol greeted him
from the midst of a huge bed drawn up against the opposite wall. Then
two arms rose, and the moaning cry of "Thomas! Thomas!" changed to a
shout, and he knew himself to be in the presence of his father.

Falling on his knees in speechless emotion, he grasped the wasted hands
held out to him. Such a face, rugged though it was and far from
fulfilling the promise held out to him in his dreams, could not but move
any man. As he gazed into it and pressed the hands in which the life
blood only seemed to linger for this last, this only embrace, all his
filial instincts were aroused and he forgot the common surroundings, the
depressing rain, his own fatigue and bitter disappointment, in his
lifelong craving for love and family recognition.

But the old man on whose breast he fell showed other emotions than those
by which he was himself actuated. It was not an embrace he craved, but
an opportunity to satisfy an almost frenzied curiosity as to the
appearance and attributes of the son who had grown to manhood under
other eyes. Pushing him gently back, he bade him stand in the light of
the lamp