ourlay was too
contemptuous of his wife and children to inform them how his business
stood. John had been brought up to go into the business, and now, at the
last moment, he was undeceived, and ordered off to a new life, from
which every instinct of his being shrank afraid. He was cursed with an
imagination in excess of his brains, and in the haze of the future he
saw two pictures with uncanny vividness--himself in bleak lodgings
raising his head from Virgil, to wonder what they were doing at home
to-night; and, contrasted with that loneliness, the others, his cronies,
laughing along the country roads beneath the glimmer of the stars. They
would be having the fine ploys while he was mewed up in Edinburgh. Must
he leave loved Barbie and the House with the Green Shutters? must he
still drudge at books which he loathed? must he venture on a new life
where everything terrified his mind?

"It's a shame!" he cried. "And I refuse to go. I don't want to leave
Barbie! I'm feared of Edinburgh," and there he stopped in conscious
impotence of speech. How could he explain his forebodings to a rock of a
man like his father?

"No more o't!" roared Gourlay, flinging out his hand--"not another word!
You go to College in October!"

"Ay, man, Johnny," said his mother, "think o' the future that's before
ye!"

"Ay," howled the youth in silly anger, "it's like to be a braw future!"

"It's the best future you can have!" growled his father.

For while rivalry, born of hate, was the propelling influence in
Gourlay's mind, other reasons whispered that the course suggested by
hate was a good one on its merits. His judgment, such as it was,
supported the impulse of his blood. It told him that the old business
would be a poor heritage for his son, and that it would be well to look
for another opening. The boy gave no sign of aggressive smartness to
warrant a belief that he would ever pull the thing together. Better make
him a minister. Surely there was enough money left about the house for
tha-at! It was the best that could befall him.

Mrs. Gourlay, for her part, though sorry to lose her son, was so pleased
at the thought of sending him to college, and making him a minister,
that she ran on in foolish maternal gabble to the wife of Drucken
Webster. Mrs. Webster informed the gossips, and they discussed the
matter at the Cross.

"Dod," said Sandy Toddle, "Gourlay's better off than I supposed!"

"Huts!" said Brodie, "it's just a wheen bluf