She took him by the hand and rose, then let him go again, saying,

'Sneck the door, laddie.'

Robert bolted the door, and his grandmother again taking his hand, led
him to the usual corner. There they knelt down together, and the old
woman's prayer was one great and bitter cry for submission to the divine
will. She rose a little strengthened, if not comforted, saying,

'Ye maun pray yer lane, laddie. But oh be a guid lad, for ye're a' that
I hae left; and gin ye gang wrang tu, ye'll bring doon my gray hairs wi'
sorrow to the grave. They're gray eneuch, and they're near eneuch to the
grave, but gin ye turn oot weel, I'll maybe haud up my heid a bit yet.
But O Anerew! my son! my son! Would God I had died for thee!'

And the words of her brother in grief, the king of Israel, opened the
floodgates of her heart, and she wept. Robert left her weeping, and
closed the door quietly as if his dead father had been lying in the
room.

He took his way up to his own garret, closed that door too, and sat down
upon the floor, with his back against the empty bedstead.

There were no more castles to build now. It was all very well to say
that he would not believe the news and would pray for his father, but
he did believe them--enough at least to spoil the praying. His favourite
employment, seated there, had hitherto been to imagine how he would grow
a great man, and set out to seek his father, and find him, and stand by
him, and be his son and servant. Oh! to have the man stroke his head
and pat his cheek, and love him! One moment he imagined himself his
indignant defender, the next he would be climbing on his knee, as if he
were still a little child, and laying his head on his shoulder. For he
had had no fondling his life long, and his heart yearned for it. But all
this was gone now. A dreary time lay before him, with nobody to please,
nobody to serve; with nobody to praise him. Grannie never praised him.
She must have thought praise something wicked. And his father was in
misery, for ever and ever! Only somehow that thought was not quite
thinkable. It was more the vanishing of hope from his own life than a
sense of his father's fate that oppressed him.

He cast his eyes, as in a hungry despair, around the empty room--or,
rather, I should have said, in that faintness which makes food at once
essential and loathsome; for despair has no proper hunger in it. The
room seemed as empty as his life. There was nothing for his eyes to res