The answer arrived in due time.  It was as proper as a letter could be.  Colin said he was just leaving for America, but did not expect to be more than six months there.  But he never said a word about coming to Crawford.  Tallisker was downright angry at the young man.  It was true his father had told him he did not wish to see him again, but that had been said under a keen sense of family wrong and of bitter disappointment.  Colin ought to have taken his father’s ready response to his request as an overture of reconciliation.  For a moment he was provoked with both of them.

“You are a dour lot, you Crawfords; ane o’ you is prouder than the ither.”

“The Crawfords are as God made them, dominie.”

“And some o’ them a little warse.”

Yet, after all, it was Colin Tallisker was really angry at.  For the present he had to let his anger lie by.  Colin had gone, and given him no address in America.

“He is feared I will be telling him his duty, and when he comes back that is what I shall do, if I go to London to mak him hear me.”

For a moment the laird looked hopefully into the dominie’s face, but the hope was yet so far off he could not grasp it.  Yet, in a dim, unacknowledged way it influenced him.  He returned to his money-making with renewed vigor.  It was evident he had let the hope of Colin’s return steal into his heart.  And the giving of that L4,000 Tallisker considered almost a sign of grace.  It had not been given from any particularly noble motive; but any motive, not sinful, roused in opposition to simple avarice, was a gain.  He was quite determined now to find Colin as soon as he returned from America.

In rather less than six months there were a few lines from Colin, saying that the money sent had been applied to the proper purpose, and had nobly fulfilled it.  The laird had said he wanted no explanations, and Colin gave him none.

Tallisker read the letter with a half smile.

“He is just the maist contrary, conceited young man I e’er heard tell o’.  Laird, as he wont come to us, I am going to him.”

The laird said nothing.  Any grief is better than a grief not sure.  It would be a relief to know all, even if that “all” were painful.

CHAPTER VIII.

Tallisker was a man as quick in action as in resolve; the next night he left for London, it was no light journey in those days for a man of his years, and who had never in all his life been farther away from Perthshire than Edinburgh.  But he feared nothing.  He was going into the wilderness after his own stray sheep, and he had a conviction that any path of duty is a safe path.  He said little to any one.  The people looked strangely on him.  He almost fancied himself to be Christian going through Vanity Fair.

He went first to Colin’s old address in Regent’s Place.  He did not expect to find him there, but it might lead him to the right place.  Number 34 Regent’s Place proved to be a very grand house.  As he went up to the door, an open carriage, containing a lady and a child, left it.  A man dressed in the Crawford tartan opened the door.