m back
again. How he went wrong may be easily guessed. He had been led astray
by evil companions his mother always said. Not that to her knowledge,
or to the knowledge of any one, he had gone so very far astray till the
end came. There had been doubts and fears for him, and earnest
expostulations from those who loved him, but it was a great shock and
surprise to all the countryside when it came to be known that he had
gone away never to return.

What he had done was certainly known only to two or three. There were
whispers of forgery, and even robbery, and some said it was only debt,
which his father refused to pay. There were others involved in the
matter, and it was kept quiet. Some of the young Holts were among the
number. Jacob, Gershom's eldest son, went away for a while. It was not
known whether they had gone together, but Jacob soon came home again,
and as far as he was concerned, everything was as before.

But after a time there came heavy tidings to Ythan Brae. Hugh Fleming
was dead--in the very flower of his youth--"with all his sins on his
head;" his father cried out in the agony of the knowledge. There was
only a word or two in a strange handwriting to say that, after sharp and
sudden illness, he had died among strangers.

The father and mother lived through the time that followed. How they
lived none knew, for they were alone at the Brae. They never passed the
bounds of their own farm through all that terrible winter, and the
neighbours, who sometimes went to see them, as a general thing only saw
Mrs Fleming. She stood between her husband and the sorrowful
curiosity, the real but painful sympathy which he could not have borne--
which even she found it so hard to bear. Neither then, nor in all the
years that followed, did any one but his boy's mother hear him utter his
boy's name. They lived through it, but that winter was like the "valley
of the shadow of death" to them both.

When spring came, the worst was over, the neighbours said, and in one
way so it was. Their son James brought his wife home to live with them,
and they settled down to their changed life, making the best of it.
Mrs Fleming's cheerfulness came back in the midst of many cares, for
her son's wife was a delicate woman, and the little children came fast
to their home. Mrs Fleming governed the household still, and in a
sense began life anew in their midst.

But after his son came to live with them, Mr Fleming gave up t