To Tommy it was like listening to his doom.  Ah, Aaron, even you could not withhold your pity, did you know how this man is being punished now for having made Elspeth so dependent on him!  Some such thought passed through Tommy’s head, but he was too brave to appeal for pity.  “If that is so,” he said firmly, “I take the responsibility for it.  But I began this talk, Aaron, not to intrude my troubles on you, but hoping to lighten yours.  If I could see you smile, Aaron——­”

“Drop it!” cried the warper; and then, going closer to him:  “You would hae seen me smile, ay, and heard me laugh, gin you had been here when Mrs. McLean came yont to read your book to me.  She fair insistit on reading the terrible noble bits to me, and she grat they were so sublime; but the sublimer they were, the mair I laughed, for I ken you, Tommy, my man, I ken you.”

He spoke with much vehemence, and, after all, our hero was not perfect.  He withdrew stiffly to the other room.  I think it was the use of the word Tommy that enraged him.

But in a very few minutes he scorned himself, and was possessed by a pensive wonder that one so tragically fated as he could resent an old man’s gibe.  Aaron misunderstood him.  Was that any reason why he should not feel sorry for Aaron?  He crossed the hallan to the kitchen door, and stopped there, overcome with pity.  The warper was still crouching by the fire, but his head rested on his chest; he was a weary, desolate figure, and at the other side of the hearth stood an empty chair.  The picture was the epitome of his life, or so it seemed to the sympathetic soul at the door, who saw him passing from youth to old age, staring at the chair that must always be empty.  At the same moment Tommy saw his own future, and in it, too, an empty chair.  Yet, hard as was his own case, at least he knew that he was loved; if her chair must be empty, the fault was as little hers as his, while Aaron——­

A noble compassion drew him forward, and he put his hand determinedly on the dear old man’s shoulder.

“Aaron,” he said, in a tremble of pity, “I know what is the real sorrow of your life, and I rejoice because I can put an end to it.  You think that Jean Myles never cared for you; but you are strangely wrong.  I was with my mother to the last, Aaron, and I can tell you, she asked me with her dying breath to say to you that she loved you all the time.”

Aaron tried to rise, but was pushed back into his chair.  “Love cannot die,” cried Tommy, triumphantly, like the fairy in the pantomime; “love is always young——­”

He stopped in mid-career at sight of Aaron’s disappointing face.  “Are you done?” the warper inquired.  “When you and me are alane in this house there’s no room for the both o’ us, and as I’ll never hae it said that I made Jean Myles’s bairn munt, I’ll go out mysel’.”

And out he went, and sat on the dyke till Elspeth came home.  It did not turn Tommy sulky.  He nodded kindly to Aaron from the window in token of forgiveness, and next day he spent a valuable hour in making a cushion for the old man’s chair.  “He must be left with the impression that you made it,” Tommy explained to Elspeth, “for he would not take it from me.”