“Havers, Jamie, it’s no’ releegious to feed a dog better than puir bairns.  He’ll do fair weel wi’ table-scraps.”

She set down a plate with a spoonful of porridge on it, a cold potato, some bread crusts, and the leavings of a broiled caller herrin’.  It was a generous breakfast for so small a dog, but Bobby had been without food for quite forty hours, and had done an amazing amount of work in the meantime.  When he had eaten all of it, he was still hungry.  As a polite hint, he polished the empty plate with his pink tongue and looked up expectantly; but the best-intentioned people, if they have had little to do with dogs, cannot read such signs.

“Ye needna lick the posies aff,” the wifie said, good humoredly, as she picked the plate up to wash it.  She thought to put down a tin basin of water.  Bobby lapped a’ it so eagerly, yet so daintily, that she added:  “He’s a weel-broucht-up tyke, Jamie.”

“He is so.  Noo, we’ll see hoo weel he can leuk.”  In a shamefaced way he fetched from a tool-box a long-forgotten, strong little currycomb, such as is used on shaggy Shetland ponies.  With that he proceeded to give Bobby such a grooming as he had never had before.  It was a painful operation, for his thatch was a stubborn mat of crisp waves and knotty tangles to his plumy tail and down to his feathered toes.  He braced himself and took the punishment without a whimper, and when it was done he stood cascaded with dark-silver ripples nearly to the floor.

“The bonny wee!” cried Mistress Jeanie.  “I canna tak’ ma twa een aff o’ ’im.”

“Ay, he’s bonny by the ordinar’.  It wad be grand, noo, gin the meenister’d fancy ‘im an’ tak’ ’im into the manse.”

The wifie considered this ruefully.  “Jamie, I was wishin’ ye didna hae to—­”

But what she wished he did not have to do, Mr. Brown did not stop to hear.  He suddenly clapped his bonnet on his head and went out.  He had an urgent errand on High Street, to buy grass and flower seeds and tools that would certainly be needed in April.  It took him an hour or more of shrewd looking about for the best bargains, in a swarm of little barnacle and cellar shops, to spend a few of the kirk’s shillings.  When he found himself, to his disgust, looking at a nail studded collar for a little dog he called himself a “doited auld fule,” and tramped back across the bridge.

At the kirkyard gate he stopped and read the notice through twice:  “No dogs permitted.”  That was as plain as “Thou shalt not.”  To the pious caretaker and trained servant it was the eleventh commandment.  He shook his head, sighed, and went in to dinner.  Bobby was not in the house, and the master of it avoided inquiring for him.  He also avoided the wifie’s wistful eye, and he busied himself inside the two kirks all the afternoon.

Because he was in the kirks, and the beautiful memorial windows of stained glass were not for the purpose of looking out, he did not see a dramatic incident that occurred in the kirkyard after three o’clock in the afternoon.  The prelude to it really began with the report of the timegun at one.  Bobby had insisted upon being let out of the lodge kitchen, and had spent the morning near Auld Jock’s grave and in nosing about neighboring slabs and thorn bushes.  When the time-gun boomed he trotted to the gate quite openly and waited there inside the wicket.