put off your boots!"

"Mother------" I said, but he broke in on my question.

"Come in, lad, and sit down. You are back from the brave wars you never
went to with my will, and you'll find stirring times here at your own
parish. It's the way of the Sennachies' stories."

"How is that, sir?"

"They tell, you know, that people wander far on the going foot for
adventure, and adventure is in the first turning of their native lane."

I was putting my boots off before a fire of hissing logs that filled the
big room with a fir-wood smell right homely and comforting to my heart,
and my father was doing what I should have known was my mother's office
if weariness had not left me in a sort of stupor--he was laying on the
board a stout and soldierly supper and a tankard of the red Bordeaux
wine the French traffickers bring to Loch Finne to trade for cured
herring. He would come up now and then where I sat fumbling sleepily at
my belt, and put a hand on my head, a curious unmanly sort of thing I
never knew my father do before, and I felt put-about at this petting,
which would have been more like my sister if ever I had had the luck to
have one.

"You are tired, Colin, my boy?" he said.

"A bit, father, a bit," I answered; "rough roads you know. I was landed
at break of day at Skipness and--Is mother------?"

"Sit in, _laochain!_ Did you meet many folks on the road?"

"No, sir; as pestilent barren a journey as ever I trotted on, and the
people seemingly on the hill, for their crops are unco late in the
field."

"Ay, ay, lad, so they are," said my father, pulling back his shoulders a
bit--a fairly straight wiry old man, with a name for good swordsmanship
in his younger days.

I was busy at a cold partridge, and hard at it, when I thought again how
curious it was that my father should be a-foot in the house at such time
of night and no one else about, he so early a bedder for ordinary and
never the last to sneck the outer door.

"Did you expect any one, father," I asked, "that you should be waiting
up with the collation, and the outer door unsnecked?"

"There was never an outer door snecked since you left, Colin," said he,
turning awkwardly away and looking hard into the loof of his hand like
a wife spaeing fortunes--for sheer want, I could see, of some engagement
for his eyes. "I could never get away with the notion that some way like
this at night would ye come back to Elngmore."

"Mother would miss me?"

"She did