softly round
him. Every eye followed till he disappeared through his own door.

He went through the kitchen, where his mother sat, carrying the bottle
openly, and entered the parlour without speaking. He came back and asked
her for the corkscrew, but when she said "Eh?" with a vague wildness in
her manner, and did not seem to understand, he went and got it for
himself. She continued making stabs at her cloth and smoothing out the
puckers in her seam.

John was heard moving in the parlour. There was the sharp _plunk_ of a
cork being drawn, followed by a clink of glass. And then came a heavy
thud like a fall.

To Mrs. Gourlay the sounds meant nothing; she heard them with her ear,
not her mind. The world around her had retreated to a hazy distance, so
that it had no meaning. She would have gazed vaguely at a shell about to
burst beside her.

In the evening, Janet, who had been in bed all the afternoon, came down
and lit the lamp for her mother. It was a large lamp which Gourlay had
bought, and it shed a rich light through the room.

"I heard John come in," she said, turning wearily round; "but I was too
ill to come down and ask what had happened. Where is he?"

"John?" questioned her mother--"John?... Ou ay," she panted, vaguely
recalling, "ou ay. I think--I think ... he gaed ben the parlour."

"The parlour!" cried Janet; "but he must be in the dark! And he canna
thole the darkness!"

"John!" she cried, going to the parlour door, "John!"

There was a silence of the grave.

She lit a candle, and went into the room. And then she gave a squeal
like a rabbit in a dog's jaws.

Mrs. Gourlay dragged her gaunt limbs wearily across the floor. By the
wavering light, which shook in Janet's hand, she saw her son lying dead
across the sofa. The whisky-bottle on the table was half empty, and of a
smaller bottle beside it he had drunk a third. He had taken all that
whisky that he might deaden his mind to the horror of swallowing the
poison. His legs had slipped to the floor when he died, but his body was
lying back across the couch, his mouth open, his eyes staring horridly
up. They were not the eyes of the quiet dead, but bulged in frozen fear,
as if his father's eyes had watched him from aloft while he died.

"There's twa thirds of the poison left," commented Mrs. Gourlay.

"Mother!" Janet screamed, and shook her. "Mother, John's deid! John's
deid! Don't ye see John's deid?"

"Ay, he's deid," said Mrs. Gourlay, starin