big with
the odds and ends of thirty years' assemblage. "I'll make a patchwork
quilt o' thir!" she explained, with a foolish, eager smile; and she
spent hours snatching up rags and vainly trying to match them. But the
quilt made no progress. She would look at a patch for a while, with her
head on one side, and pat it all over with restless hands; then she
would turn it round, to see if it would look better that way, only to
tear it off when it was half sewn, to try another and yet another. Often
she would forget the work on her lap, and stare across the room,
open-mouthed, her fingers plucking at her withered throat. Janet became
afraid of her mother.

Once she saw her smiling to herself, when she thought nobody was
watching her--an uncanny smile as of one who hugged a secret to her
breast--a secret that, eluding others, would enable its holder to elude
them too.

"What can _she_ have to laugh at?" Janet wondered.

At times the haze that seemed gathering round Mrs. Gourlay's mind would
be dispelled by sudden rushes of fear, when she would whimper lest her
son be hanged, or herself come on the parish in her old age. But that
was rarely. Her brain was mercifully dulled, and her days were passed in
a restless vacancy.

She was sitting with the rags scattered round her when John walked in on
the evening of the third day. There were rags everywhere--on the table,
and all about the kitchen; she sat in their midst like a witch among the
autumn leaves. When she looked towards his entrance the smell of drink
was wafted from the door.

"John!" she panted, in surprise--"John, did ye not go to Glasgow, boy?"

"Ay," he said slowly, "I gaed to Glasgow."

"And the bond, John--did ye speir about the bond?"

"Ay," he said, "I speired about the bond. The whole house is sunk in't."

"Oh!" she gasped, and the whole world seemed to go from beneath her, so
weak did she feel through her limbs.

"John," she said, after a while, "did ye no try to get something to do,
that you might help me and Janet now we're helpless?"

"No," he said; "for the een wouldna let me. Nicht and day they follow me
a'where--nicht and day."

"Are they following ye yet, John?" she whispered, leaning forward
seriously. She did not try to disabuse him now; she accepted what he
said. Her mind was on a level with his own. "Are they following ye yet?"
she asked, with large eyes of sympathy and awe.

"Ay, and waur than ever too. They're getting redder and red