rjorie in her arms.

He had not forgotten his plans or his purposes. There were moments when
he would have been willing to forget them, when he even tried to forget
them and to smile at his thought of them, as he had sometimes smiled at
a foolish dream in the light of the morning. He was not quite sure that
he needed to speak to his mother at all. He might at least wait a
while. Why should he trouble her by speaking about changes which might
never come?

And yet, had he not told his mother all his plans and even his thoughts
all his life? Her word would make clear what course he should take.
Her "single eye" would see the fine scheme he had been dreaming about in
its true light. He could trust his mother's wise simplicity more than
his own ambitious desires, which could hardly be worthy, he thought,
since they were the outcome of discontent.

And why should he not be content as he was? He had fallen from no high
estate. His father and his father's father had wrought with their
hands, and had been honoured of all who knew them. Why should he not be
content to live as they lived, or to work his way upward to an easier
life, as his father had done?

"At any rate, I will have it out with my mother to-night," said he.

He was standing, when he came to this resolve, on the very spot where he
first caught sight of Allison Bain. It was the second time he had stood
there since that day, for no reason that he could have told to any one.
He had come to the spot in the early morning after that first sleepless
night. He needed a walk to stretch his legs, which were rather stiff
after the long tramp of yesterday, he told his mother, when he came home
to the breakfast he had kept waiting, and he told himself that he only
chanced to take that road rather than another.

He said nothing about it to Robert Hume. They had the night before
agreed to take an early walk together. Robin was late; but happily, as
he thought, he caught sight of John as he was disappearing over the
first hilltop, and followed with no thought of finding himself in the
way.

But when he came to the head of the last hillock, and saw John standing
where he had stood the day before, "looking at nothing," as Robin told
his mother afterward, he was seized with sudden shamefaced-ness, and
turning, shot like an arrow down the brae.

John had been less at the manse than he usually was while visiting his
mother. He was to go there in the evening, and