“That creature is a spirit,” said the mother.  “She sees the evil in the dark before it comes, and wards it off like a guardian angel; but oh! she has little in her power to be an angel.”

And rising, she took up the paper.  It was only some bread and cheese, which the girl, knowing the privations of her mother, had bought with a part of her five shillings a week.

Thereafter, just as little Jeannie had intimated, came in two officers, with the usual looks of duty appearing through their professional sorrow.

“We want your son, good woman.”

“He is there,” said she; “but what want ye him for?”

“Not for going to church,” said the man, forgetting said professional sorrow in his love of a joke, “but for robbery on the highway; and we must search the house for five pounds in British Linen Company notes.”

And the men proceeded to search, even putting their hands in the mother’s pockets, besides rifling those of the son.  They of course found nothing except the powder and shot, which had still remained there, and a handkerchief.

“That is something, anyhow,” said one of the men, “and a great deal too.  The one who is up in the office says true; he was not the man.”

“No more he was,” said Charles.  “I am the man you ought to take; and take me.”

“Sae, sae; just as I suspected,” muttered the mother.  “Lord, Lord! the cup runs over.  It was e’en lipping when John died; but I will bear yet.”  And she seemed to grasp firmly the back of a chair, and compressed her lips—­an attitude she maintained like a statue all the time occupied by the departure of her son.  The door closed—­he was gone; and she still stood, the vivum cadaver—­the image of a petrified creature of misery.

Yet, overcome as her very calmness was, and enchanted for the moment into voicelessness and utter inaction, she was not that kind of women who sit and bear the stripes without an effort to ward them off.  If Jeannie was as quick as lightning, she was sure as that which follows the flash.  She thought for a moment, “God does not absolutely and for ever leave his servants.”  Some thought had struck her.  She put on her bonnet and cloak deliberately, even looking into the glass to see if she was tidy enough for where she intended going, and for whom she intended to see.

And now this quiet woman is on her way down Broughton Street at twelve o’clock of a cold winter night, which, like her own mind, had only that calmness which results from the exhaustion of sudden biting gusts from the north, and therefore right in her face.  She drew her cloak round her.  She had a long way to go, but her son was in danger of the gallows; and thoughtless, and as it now seemed, wicked as he was, he was yet her son.  The very word is a volume of heart language—­not the fitful expression of passion, but that quiet eloquence which bedews the eye and brings deep sighs with holy recollections