his heedless sleep; unconscious of the radiant planet of love
that had been folding him round in its atmosphere of affection.

But while he thus ministered, a new question arose in his mind--to meet
with its own new, God-given answer. What if this should not be the man
after all?--if this love had been spent in mistake, and did not belong
to him at all? The answer was, that he was a man. The love Robert had
given he could not, would not withdraw. The man who had been for a
moment as his father he could not cease to regard with devotion. At
least he was a man with a divine soul. He might at least be somebody's
father. Where love had found a moment's rest for the sole of its foot,
there it must build its nest.

When he had got him safe in bed, he sat down beside him to think what
he would do next. This sleep gave him very needful leisure to think. He
could determine nothing--not even how to find out if he was indeed his
father. If he approached the subject without guile, the man might be
fearful and cunning--might have reasons for being so, and for striving
to conceal the truth. But this was the first thing to make sure of,
because, if it was he, all the hold he had upon him lay in his knowing
it for certain. He could not think. He had had little sleep the night
before. He must not sleep this night. He dragged his bath into his
sitting-room, and refreshed his faculties with plenty of cold water,
then lighted his pipe and went on thinking--not without prayer to that
Power whose candle is the understanding of man. All at once he saw how
to begin. He went again into the chamber, and looked at the man, and
handled him, and knew by his art that a waking of some sort was nigh.
Then he went to a corner of his sitting-room, and from beneath the table
drew out a long box, and from the box lifted Dooble Sandy's auld wife,
tuned the somewhat neglected strings, and laid the instrument on the
table.

When, keeping constant watch over the sleeping man, he judged at length
that his soul had come near enough to the surface of the ocean of sleep
to communicate with the outer world through that bubble his body, which
had floated upon its waves all the night unconscious, he put his chair
just outside the chamber door, which opened from his sitting-room, and
began to play gently, softly, far away. For a while he extemporized
only, thinking of Rothieden, and the grandmother, and the bleach-green,
and the hills, and the waste old factory, a