The mother took up the notes, and counted them slowly; for she had been inured to grief, and was always calm, even when her heart beat fast with the throbs of anguish.

“And whaur fae, laddie?” she said, as she turned her grey eye and scanned deeply the pale face of her son.

Silent, even dogged!  Where now his metaphysics, his gibes on the physicalities, the moralities, the spiritualities?—­all bundled up in a vibrating chord.

“Whaur fae, Charlie,” had she repeated, still looking at him.

“The devil!” cried he, stung by her searching look, which brought back a gleam of the old rebellion.

“A gude paymaster to his servants,” she said; “but I’m no ane o’ them yet; and may the Lord, wham I serve, even while his chastening hand is heavy upon me, preserve me frae his bribes!” And laying down the notes, she added, not lightly, as it might seem, but seriously, yet quietly,

“Nae wonder they’re warm.”

The notes had carried the heat of his burning hand.

“The auld story—­billiards,” said she again; “for they are the devil’s cue and balls.”

No answer; and the mother seating herself again, looked stedfastly and suspiciously at him; but she could not catch the eye of her son, who sat doggedly determined not to reveal his secret, and as determined also to elude her looks, searching as they were, and sufficient to enter his very soul.  Yet she loved him too well to objurgate where she was only as yet suspicious; and in the quietness of the hour, she fell for a moment into her widowed habit of speaking as if none were present but herself.

“Wharfor bore I him—­wharfor toiled and wrought for him for sae mony years, since the time he sat on my knee smiling in my face, as if he said, I will comfort you when you are old, and will be your stay and support?  Was that smile then a lee, put there by the devil, wha has gi’en him the money to deceive me again?”

Then she paused.

“And how could that be?  Love is not a cheat; and did ever bairn love a mither as he loved me? or did ever mither love her bairn as I hae loved him?  Lord, deliver him frae his enemies, and mak him what he was in thae bygone days—­sae innocent, sae cheerful, sae obedient; and I will meekly suffer a’ Thou canst lay upon me.”

The words reached the ears of the son, and the audible sobs seemed to startle the solemn spirit of the hour and the place.  “What would she say,” he thought, “if she heard me declare I had robbed my uncle?”

At that moment the door opened, and in rushed little Jeanie S——­th,—­her face pale, and her blue eyes lighted with fear, and the thin delicate nostril distended, and hissing with her quick breathings,—­

“Oh mither, there’s twa officers on the stair seeking Charlie!”

And the quick creature, darting her eye on the table where the notes lay, snatched them up, and secreted them in her bosom; and, what was more extraordinary, just as if she had divined something more from her brother’s looks, which told her that that money would be sought for by these officers, she darted off like a bird with a crumb in its bill, which it has picked up from beneath your eyes; but not before depositing, as she passed, a paper on a chair near the door.