Mrs Ogilvy went wearily up-stairs after the suspense and alarm of this long, long day. It was all that she could do to drag one foot after another, to keep upright; her brain was in a confusion of misery, out of which she now could distinguish no distinct sentiment—terror and grief and suspense, and the vague wild apprehension of some unintelligible catastrophe, all mingling together. When she reached the head of the stairs she met Robbie, who told her, not looking at her, that he had bidden Janet prepare the supper earlier than usual, “for we’ll have to make a start to-night,” he said.

She seized his hand in her frail ones, which could scarcely hold it. “Robbie, will you go?—will you go, and break my heart?”

“It’s of no use speaking, mother; let me be free of you at least, for God’s sake! You will drive me mad—{331}—”

“Robbie! Robbie! my only son—my only child! I’ll be dead and gone before ever you could come back.”

“You’ll live the longest of the two of us, mother.”

“God forbid!” she said; “God forbid! But why will ye go out into the jaws of death and the mouth of hell? If the pursuers of blood are after him, they are not after you. Oh, Robbie, stay with your mother. Dinna forsake me for a strange man.”

“Mother,” he said, with a hoarse voice, “when your friend is in deadly danger, is that the time, think you, to forsake him?”

And Mrs Ogilvy was silent. She looked at him with a gasp in her throat. All her old teachings, the tenets of her life, came back upon her and choked her. When your friend is in deadly danger! Was it not she who had taught her son that of all the moments of life that was the last to choose to abandon a friend. She could make him no answer; she only stared at him with troubled failing eyes.

“But once he is in safety,” Robbie said, with a stammer of hesitation and confusion, “once I can feel sure that—— Mother, I promise you, if I can help it, I will not go—where he is going. I—promise you.” He cast a look behind him. There was no one there, but Lew’s door was open, and it was possible he might hear. Robbie bent forward hastily to his mother’s ear. “I cannot stand against him,” he said; “I cannot: I{332} told you—he is my master,—didn’t I tell you? But I will come back—I will come back—as soon as I am free.”

He trembled, too, throughout his big bulk, with agitation and excitement—more than she ever did in her weakness. If this was so, was it not now her business to be strong to support her boy? She went on to her room to put on her other cap, to prepare for the evening, and the last meal they were to eat together. The habits of life are so strong; her heart was breaking, and yet she knew that it was time to put on her evening cap. She went into her room, too, with the feeling that there no new agitation could come near her, that she might kneel down a moment by her bedside, and get a little calm and strength. But not to-night. To her astonishment and horror, the tall figure of Lew raised itself from the old-fashioned escritoire in which she kept her papers and did her writing. He turned round, and faced her with a laugh. “Oh, it is you!” he said. “I thought it was your good son Bob. You surprised us when we were making a little examination by ourselves. It is always better to examine for yourself, don’t you know——”

“To examine—what?”

“Where the money is, mother,” he said, with another laugh.

She had herself closed the door before she had seen him. She was at his mercy.{333}

“You think, then,” she said, “that I’ve told you a lie—about money?”

“Everybody tells lies about money, mother. I never knew one yet who did not declare he had none—until it was taken out of his pockets, or out of his boxes, or out of a nice little piece of furniture like this, which an old lady can keep in her bedroom—locked.”

She took her keys out of her pocket, a neat little bunch, shining like silver, and handed them to him without a word. He received them with a somewhat startled look. It was something like the sensation of having the other cheek turned to you, after having struck the first. He had been examining the lock with a view to opening by other methods. The keys put into his hand startled him; but again he carried it off with a laugh. “Plucky old girl!” he said. And then he turned round and proceeded to open the well-worn old secretary which had enclosed all Mrs Ogilvy’s little valuables, and the records of her thoughts since she was a girl. It opened as easily as any door, and gave up its little treasures, her letters, her little memorials, the records of an innocent woman’s evanescent joys and lasting sorrows. The rough adventurer, whose very presence here was a kind of sacrilege, stooped over the little writing-board, the dainty little drawers, like a bear examining a beehive. He pulled out a drawer or two, in which there were bundles of old letters, all neatly tied up,{334} touching them as if his hands were too big for the little ivory knobs; and then he suddenly turned round upon her, shutting the drawers again hurriedly, and flung the keys into her lap.

“Hang it all! I cannot do it. I’ve not come to that. Rob a rogue by day or night; that’s fair enough: but turn to picking and stealing. No! take back your keys—you may have millions for me. I can’t look up your little drawers, d—n you!” he cried.

“No, laddie!” said Mrs Ogilvy, looking up at him with tears in her eyes, “you’re fit for better things.”

He looked at her strangely. She sat quite still beside him, not moving, not even taking up her keys, which lay in her lap.

“You think so, do you?” he said. “And yet I would have killed you last night.”

“Thank the Lord,” said the old lady, “that delivered you from that temptation.”

“That saved your life, you mean. But it wasn’t the Lord. It was Bob, your son, who couldn’t stand and see it after all.”

“Thank the Lord still more,” she said, “that wakened the old heart, his own natural heart, in my boy.”

“Well that is one view to take of it,” said Lew. “I should have thought it more sensible, however, to thank the Lord, as you say, for your own life.”

Mrs Ogilvy rose up. The keys of her treasures fell{335} to the ground. What were they to her at this moment? “And what is my life to me,” she said, “that I should think of it instead of better things? Do you think it matters much to me, left here alone an auld wreck on the shore, without a son, without a companion, without a hope for this world, whether I live or die? Man!” she cried, laying a hand on his arm, “it’s not that I would give it for my Robbie, my own son, over and over and over! but I would give it for you. Oh, dinna think that I am making a false pretence! For you, laddie, that are none of mine, that would have killed me last night, that would kill me now for ever so little that I stood in your way.”

“No!” he said in a hoarse murmur, “no!”—but she saw still the gleam of the devil in his eye, that murderous sense of power—that he had but to put forth a hand.

“If it would not be for the sin on your soul—you that are taking my son from me—you might take my life too, and welcome,” she said.

She could not stand. She was restless, too, and could not bear one position. She sank upon her chair again, and, lifting up the keys, laid them down upon the open escritoire, where they lay shining between the two, neither of use nor consequence to either. Lew began to pace up and down the room, half abashed at his own weakness, half furious at his failure. She might have millions—but he could not{336} fish them out of her drawers, not he. That was no man’s work. He could have killed her last night, and he could, she divined, kill her now, with a sort of satisfaction, but not rob her escritoire.

“Mr Lew, will you leave me my son?” she said.

“No: I have nothing to do with it; he comes of his own will,” cried the other. “You make yourself a fine idea of your son. Do you know he has been in with me in everything? Ah! he has his own scruples; he has not mine. He interfered last night; but he’d turn out your drawers as soon as look at you. It’s a pity he’s not here to do it.”

“Will you leave me my son?” she repeated again; “he is all I have in the world.”

“I’ve got less,” cried Lew; “I haven’t even a son, and don’t want one. You are a deal better without him. Whatever he might be when he was a boy, Bob’s a rover now. He never would settle down. He would do you a great deal more harm than good.”

“Will you leave me my son?” she said again.

“No! I can say No as well as you, mother; but I’ve nothing to do with it. Ask himself, not me. Do you think this is a place for a man? What can he do? Who would he see? Nobody. It is not living—it is making believe to live. No; he won’t stay here if he will be guided by me.”

The door opened suddenly, and Robbie looked in. “Are you going to stay all night?” he said, gruffly.{337} “There’s supper waiting, and no time to be lost, if——”

“If—we take that long run we were thinking of to-night. Well, let’s go. Mrs Ogilvy, you’re going to keep us company to-night.”

“It’s the last time,” said her son.

“Oh, Robbie, Robbie!” she cried.

“Stop that, mother. I’ve said all I’m going to say.”

To sit down round the table with the dishes served as usual, the lamp shining, the men eating largely, even it seemed with enjoyment, a little conversation going on—was to go from one dreadful dream to another with scarcely a pause between. Was it real that they were sitting there to-day and would be far away to-morrow? That this was her son, whom she could touch, and to-morrow he would have disappeared again into the unseen? Love is the most obdurate, the most unreasoning thing in the world. Mrs Ogilvy knew now very well what her Robbie was. There were few revelations which could have been made to her on the subject. Perhaps—oh, horrible thing to think or say!—it was better for her before he came back, when she had thought that his absence was the great sorrow of her life: she had learnt many other things since then. Perhaps in his heart the father of the prodigal learned this lesson too, and knew that, even with the best robe upon him, and the ring on{338} his finger and the shoes on his feet, he was still hankering after the hu............