“You are a maist respectable man, Colin, but I dinna like it at all.  What are you doing wi’ your time?  This grand house costs something.”

“I am an artist—­a successful one, if that is not also against me.”

“Your father would think sae.  Oh, my dear lad, you hae gane far astray from the old Crawford ways.”

“I cannot help that, dominie.  I must live according to my light.  I am sorry about father.”

Then the dominie in the most forcible manner painted the old laird’s hopes and cruel disappointments.  There were tears in Colin’s eyes as he reasoned with him.  And at this point his own son came into the room.  Perhaps for the first time Colin looked at the lad as the future heir of Crawford.  A strange thrill of family and national pride stirred his heart.  He threw the little fellow shoulder high, and in that moment regretted that he had flung away the child’s chance of being Earl of Crawford.  He understood then something of the anger and suffering his father had endured, and he put the boy down very solemnly.  For if Colin was anything, he was just; if his father had been his bitterest enemy, he would, at this moment, have acknowledged his own aggravation.

Then Mrs. Crawford came in.  She had heard all about the dominie, and she met him like a daughter.  Colin had kept his word.  This fair, sunny-haired, blue-eyed woman was the wife he had dreamed about; and Tallisker told him he had at any rate done right in that matter.  “The bonnie little Republican,” as he called her, queened it over the dominie from the first hour of their acquaintance.

He stayed a week in London, and during it visited Colin’s studio.  He went there at Colin’s urgent request, but with evident reluctance.  A studio to the simple dominie had almost the same worldly flavor as a theatre.  He had many misgivings as they went down Pall Mall, but he was soon reassured.  There was a singular air of repose and quiet in the large, cool room.  And the first picture he cast his eyes upon reconciled him to Colin’s most un-Crawford-like taste.

It was “The Farewell of the Emigrant Clan.”  The dominie’s knees shook, and he turned pale with emotion.  How had Colin reproduced that scene, and not only reproduced but idealized it!  There were the gray sea and the gray sky, and the gray granite boulder rocks on which the chief stood, the waiting ships, and the loaded boats, and he himself in the prow of the foremost one.  He almost felt the dear old hymn thrilling through the still room.  In some way, too, Colin had grasped the grandest points of his father’s character.  In this picture the man’s splendid physical beauty seemed in some mysterious way to give assurance of an equally splendid spiritual nature.