he would hae
seen 'im as sune as he turned the corner."

"If he ever comes back, the sacket (rascal)," T'nowhead said to Jess,
"we'll show 'im the door gey quick."

Jess just looked, and all the women knew how she would take Jamie to
her arms.

We did not know of the London woman then, and Jess never knew of her.
Jamie's mother never for an hour allowed that he had become anything
but the loving laddie of his youth.

"I ken 'im ower weel," she always said, "my ain Jamie."

Toward the end she was sure he was dead. I do not know when she first
made up her mind to this, nor whether it was not merely a phrase for
those who wanted to discuss him with her. I know that she still sat at
the window looking at the elbow of the brae.

The minister was with her when she died. She was in her chair, and he
asked her, as was his custom, if there was any particular chapter which
she would like him to read. Since her husband's death she had always
asked for the fourteenth of John, "Hendry's chapter," as it is still
called among a very few old people in Thrums. This time she asked him
to read the sixteenth chapter of Genesis.

"When I came to the thirteenth verse," the minister told me, "'And she
called the name of the Lord that spake unto her. Thou God seest me,'
she covered her face with her two hands, and said, 'Joey's text, Joey's
text. Oh, but I grudged ye sair, Joey.'"

"I shut the book," the minister said, "when I came to the end of the
chapter, and then I saw that she was dead. It is my belief that her
heart broke one-and-twenty years ago."

CHAPTER XXII

JAMIE'S HOME-COMING

On a summer day, when the sun was in the weavers' workshops, and bairns
hopped solemnly at the game of palaulays, or gaily shook their bottles
of sugarelly water into a froth, Jamie came back. The first man to see
him was Hookey Crewe, the post.

"When he came frae London," Hookey said afterwards at T'nowhead's
pig-sty, "Jamie used to wait for me at Zoar, i' the north end o'
Tilliedrum. He carried his box ower the market muir, an' sat on't at
Zoar, waitin' for me to catch 'im up. Ay, the day afore yesterday me
an' the powny was clatterin' by Zoar, when there was Jamie standin' in
his identical place. He hadna nae box to sit upon, an' he was far frae
bein' weel in order, but I kent 'im at aince, an' I saw 'at he was
waitin' for me. So I drew up, an' waved my hand to 'im."

"I would hae drove straucht by 'im," said T'nowhead