he would care to send
himself, must in all likelihood have come through him.--For Bruce the
elder had determined that in his son he would restore the fallen
fortunes of the family, giving him such an education as would entitle
him to hold up his head with the best, and especially with that proud
upstart, Alec Forbes.

The news had reached Thomas Crann, and filled him with concern. He had,
as was his custom in trouble, betaken himself straightway to "the
throne of grace," and "wrestled in prayer" with God that he would
restore the prodigal to his mother. What would Thomas have thought if
he had been told that his anxiety, genuine as it was, that his love,
true as it was, did not come near the love and anxiety of another man
who spent his evenings in drinking whisky and reading heathen poets,
and who, although he knew not a little of his Bible, never opened it
from one end of the year to the other? If he had been told that Cosmo
Cupples had more than once, after the first tumbler of toddy and before
the second, betaken himself to his prayers for his poor Alec Forbes,
and entreated God Almighty to do for him what he could not do, though
he would die for him--to rescue him from the fearful pit and the miry
clay of moral pollution--if he had heard this, he would have said that
it was a sad pity, but such prayers could not be answered, seeing he
that prayed was himself in the gall of bitterness and the bond of
iniquity.

There was much shaking of the head amongst the old women. Many an
ejaculation and many a meditative _eh me_! were uttered over Alec's
fall; and many a word of tender pity for his poor mother floated forth
on the frosty air of Glamerton; but no one ventured to go and tell the
dreary tidings. The men left it to the women; and the woman knew too
well how the bearer of such ill news would appear in her eyes, to
venture upon the ungracious task. So they said to themselves she must
know it just as well as they did; or if she did not know, poor woman!
she would know time enough for all the good it would do her. And that
came of sending sons to colleges! &c., &c.

But there was just one not so easily satisfied about the extent of her
duties: that was little Isie Constable.

CHAPTER LXXIV.

The tertians gave a supper at Luckie Cumstie's, and invited the
magistrands. On such an occasion Beauchamp, with his high sense of his
own social qualities, would not willingly be absent. When the hour
arrived, h