of life to him. For one thing, the son's success would justify the
father's past and prevent it being quite useless; it would have produced
a minister, a successful man, one of an esteemed profession. Again, that
success would be a salve to Gourlay's wounded pride; the Gourlays would
show Barbie they could flourish yet, in spite of their present downcome.
Thus, in the collapse of his fortunes, the son grew all-important in the
father's eyes. Nor did his own poverty seem to him a just bar to his
son's prosperity. "I have put him through his Arts," thought Gourlay;
"surely he can do the rest himsell. Lots of young chaps, when they
warstle through their Arts, teach the sons of swells to get a little
money to gang through Diveenity. My boy can surely do the like!" Again
and again, as Gourlay felt himself slipping under in the world of
Barbie, his hopes turned to John in Edinburgh. If that boy would only
hurry up and get through, to make a hame for the lassie and the auld
wife!

CHAPTER XXIII.

Young Gourlay spent that winter in Edinburgh pretty much as he had spent
the last. Last winter, however, it was simply a weak need for
companionship that drew him to the Howff. This winter it was more: it
was the need of a formed habit that must have its wonted satisfaction.
He had a further impulse to conviviality now. It had become a habit that
compelled him.

The diversions of some men are merely subsidiary to their lives,
externals easy to be dropped; with others they usurp the man. They usurp
a life when it is never happy away from them, when in the midst of other
occupations absent pleasures rise vivid to the mind, with an
irresistible call. Young Gourlay's too-seeing imagination, always
visioning absent delights, combined with his weakness of will, never
gripping to the work before him, to make him hate his lonely studies and
long for the jolly company of his friends. He never opened his books of
an evening but he thought to himself, "I wonder what they're doing at
the Howff to-night?" At once he visualized the scene, imagined every
detail, saw them in their jovial hours. And, seeing them so happy, he
longed to be with them. On that night, long ago, when his father ordered
him to College, his cowardly and too vivid mind thought of the ploys the
fellows would be having along the Barbie roads, while he was mewed up in
Edinburgh. He saw the Barbie rollickers in his mind's eye, and the
student in his lonely rooms, and c