Och hone!'

Robert took his father's hand, and led him towards the bed. They drew
nigh softly, and bent over the withered, but not even yet very wrinkled
face. The smooth, white, soft hands lay on the sheet, which was folded
back over her bosom. She was asleep, or rather, she slumbered.

But the soul of the child began to grow in the withered heart of the old
man as he regarded his older mother, and as it grew it forced the tears
to his eyes, and the words to his lips.

'Mother!' he said, and her eyelids rose at once. He stooped to kiss
her, with the tears rolling down his face. The light of heaven broke and
flashed from her aged countenance. She lifted her weak hands, took his
head, and held it to her bosom.

'Eh! the bonnie gray heid!' she said, and burst into a passion of
weeping. She had kept some tears for the last. Now she would spend all
that her griefs had left her. But there came a pause in her sobs, though
not in her weeping, and then she spoke.

'I kent it a' the time, O Lord. I kent it a' the time. He's come hame.
My Anerew, my Anerew! I'm as happy 's a bairn. O Lord! O Lord!'

And she burst again into sobs, and entered paradise in radiant weeping.

Her hands sank away from his head, and when her son gazed in her face he
saw that she was dead. She had never looked at Robert.

The two men turned towards each other. Robert put out his arms. His
father laid his head on his bosom, and went on weeping. Robert held him
to his heart.

When shall a man dare to say that God has done all he can?

CHAPTER XIX. THE WHOLE STORY.

The men laid their mother's body with those of the generations that had
gone before her, beneath the long grass in their country churchyard
near Rothieden--a dreary place, one accustomed to trim cemeteries and
sentimental wreaths would call it--to Falconer's mind so friendly to the
forsaken dust, because it lapt it in sweet oblivion.

They returned to the dreary house, and after a simple meal such as both
had used to partake of in their boyhood, they sat by the fire, Andrew in
his mother's chair, Robert in the same chair in which he had learned his
Sallust and written his versions. Andrew sat for a while gazing into the
fire, and Robert sat watching his face, where in the last few months a
little feeble fatherhood had begun to dawn.

'It was there, father, that grannie used to sit, every day, sometimes
looking in the fire for hours, thinking about you, I know,' Robert said