This had passed enough for her to know there would be a respite for perhaps a good many hours, and she had yielded to the entreaty or command of Bobus, that she would lie down and sleep, trusting to him to call her at any moment.

Presently, as morning light stole in, Jock’s eyes were open, gazing at him fondly, and he whispered, “Dear old Bob,” then presently, “Open the window.”

The sun was rising, and the wooded hillside opposite was all one gorgeous mass of autumn colouring, of every shade from purple to golden yellow, so glorious that it arrested Bobus’s attention even at that instant.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” asked the feeble voice.

“Wonderful, as we always heard.”

“Lift me a little.  I like to see it.  Not fast—-or high-—so.”

Bobus raised the white wasted form, and rested the head against his square firm shoulder.  “Dear old Bob!  This is jolly!  I’m not cramping you?”

“O no, but should not you have something?”

“What time is it?”

“6.30.”

“Too soon yet for that misery;” then, after some silence, “I’m so glad you are come.  Can you take mother home?”

“I would; but you will.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Now, Jock, you are not getting into Armine’s state of mind, giving yourself up and wishing to die?”

“Not at all.  There are hosts of things I want to do first.  There’s that discovery of father’s.  With what poor Janet told me of Hermann’s doings, and what I saw at Abville, if I could only get an hour of my proper wits, I could put the others up to a wrinkle that would make the whole thing comparatively plain.”

“Should not you be better if you dictated it, and got it off your mind?”

“So I thought and tried, but presently I saw mother looking queer, and she said I was tired, and had gone on enough.  I made her read it to me afterwards, and I had gone off into a muddle, and said something that would have been sheer murder.  So I had better leave it alone.  Old Vanbro mistrusts every word I say because of the Hermann connection, and indeed I may not always have talked sense to him.  Those things work out in God’s own time, and the Monk is on the track.  I’d like to have seen him, but I’ve got you.”

This had been said in faint slow utterances, so low that Bobus could hardly have heard a couple of feet further off, and with intervals between, and there was a gesture of tender perfect content in the contact with him that went to his heart, and, before he was aware, a great hot tear came dropping down on Jock’s forehead and caused an exclamation.

“I beg your pardon,” said Bobus.  “Oh!  Jock, you don’t know what it is to find you like this.  I came with so much to ask and talk of to you.”

Jock looked up inquiringly.

“You were right to suppress that paper of mine,” continued Bobus, “I wouldn’t have written it now.  I have seen better what a people are without Christianity, be the code what it may, and the civilisation, it can’t produce such women as my mother, no, nor such men as you, Jockey, my boy,” he muttered much lower.