Barbie on the nichts at e'en! Even people whom
he did not know he could locate with warm sure feelings of superiority.
If a poor workman slouched past him on the road, he set him down in his
heart as one of that rotten crowd from the Weaver's Vennel or the
Tinker's Wynd. Barbie was in subjection to the mind of the son of the
important man. To dash about Barbie in a gig, with a big dog walloping
behind, his coat-collar high about his ears, and the reek of a
meerschaum pipe floating white and blue many yards behind him, jovial
and sordid nonsense about home--that had been his ideal. His father, he
thought angrily, had encouraged the ideal, and now he forbade it, like
the brute he was. From the earth in which he was rooted so deeply his
father tore him, to fling him on a world he had forbidden him to know.
His heart presaged disaster.

Old Gourlay would have scorned the sentimentality of seeing him off from
the station, and Mrs. Gourlay was too feckless to propose it for
herself. Janet had offered to convoy him, but when the afternoon came
she was down with a racking cold. He was alone as he strolled on the
platform--a youth well-groomed and well-supplied, but for once in his
life not a swaggerer, though the chance to swagger was unique. He was
pointed out as "Young Gourlay off to the College." But he had no
pleasure in the role, for his heart was in his boots.

He took the slow train to Skeighan, where he boarded the express. Few
sensational experiences were unknown to his too-impressionable mind, and
he knew the animation of railway travelling. Coming back from Skeighan
in an empty compartment on nights of the past, he had sometimes shouted
and stamped and banged the cushions till the dust flew, in mere joy of
his rush through the air; the constant rattle, the quick-repeated noise,
getting at his nerves, as they get at the nerves of savages and
Englishmen on Bank Holidays. But any animation of the kind which he felt
to-day was soon expelled by the slow uneasiness welling through his
blood. He had no eager delight in the unknown country rushing past; it
inspired him with fear. He thought with a feeble smile of what Mysie
Monk said when they took her at the age of sixty (for the first time in
her life) to the top of Milmannoch Hill. "Eh," said Mysie, looking round
her in amaze--"eh, sirs, it's a lairge place the world when you see it
all!" Gourlay smiled because he had the same thought, but feebly,
because he was cowering