d the heart to help to save some
poor fellow as your father saved me."

"Thank you for the good wish. I will try to follow in my father's
steps," said John. "But the money is my mother's, and the pleasure of
doing good with it will be hers."

"And if all I have heard of her be true, her pleasure will be to give
pleasure to her son," said his friend.

"Yes; that is true, too," said John.

But as the money was well invested, it was to be allowed to remain where
it was for the present. The income from it would secure to his mother a
home more like that to which she was born than the one in which she had
lived since her husband's death, "though, God bless her, she has never
murmured," said her son.

And John was triumphing in his heart. He saw, or he thought he saw, his
way clear to the carrying out of several plans, which he had been
dreaming about, but which he had hardly suffered himself to regard as
possible till now. He had been in Aberdeen all the winter, working both
with his head and his hands. He had fallen in with an old schoolfellow,
who was in the second year of his university course, a cripple lad, who
was altogether unfit for the kind of life enjoyed most by lads of his
age when set free from their lectures and their hours of study. He was
living a lonely life till John found him, and his visits to the lad's
rooms were good for them both.

John had been reading steadily during the winter leisure of the years he
had been in Nethermuir, and now he enjoyed greatly going over the ground
with his friend, and gradually the knowledge came to him that he had
grown in mind as well as in stature since the days when he had trifled
with, or utterly neglected, the opportunities which had been given him.
He could do now with ease and pleasure that which in those idle days had
been a task and a burden. Gradually that which had been a vague
longing, a half-acknowledged desire, became a settled purpose.

It was to consult with his mother as to the carrying out of this purpose
that he had come to Nethermuir at this time, and he had not meant to
sleep until all his plans were laid before her. But when three days had
passed--on the fourth he was to return to Aberdeen--not a word with
regard to them had been uttered. John had not got out of the maze into
which he had fallen when he first caught sight of Allison Bain, standing
with loosened hair and smiling eyes, watching the mad play of the
bairns, with little Ma