I opened my desk and took from it a yellow manuscript.

“Here,” I said, “is the poem.  You see, I never finished it.”

I was fingering the thing grimly when Gavin’s eye fell on something else in the desk.  It was an ungainly clasp-knife, as rusty as if it had spent a winter beneath a hedge.

“I seem to remember that knife,” he said.

“Yes,” I answered, “you should remember it.  Well, after three months Adam tired of his wife.”

I stopped again.  This was a story in which only the pauses were eloquent.

“Perhaps I have no right to say he tired of her.  One day, however, he sauntered away from Harvie whistling, his dog at his heels as ever, and was not seen again for nearly six years.  When I heard of his disappearance I packed my books in that kist and went to Harvie, where I opened a school.  You see, every one but Margaret believed that Adam had fallen over the cliffs and been drowned.”

“But the dog?” said Gavin.

“We were all sure that, if he had fallen over, it had jumped after him.  The fisher-folk said that he could have left his shadow behind as easily as it.  Yet Margaret thought for long that he had tired of Harvie merely and gone back to sea, and not until two years had passed would she marry me.  We lived in Adam’s house.  It was so near the little school that when I opened the window in summer-time she could hear the drone of our voices.  During the weeks before you were born I kept that window open all day long, and often I went to it and waved my hand to her.

“Sometimes, when she was washing or baking, I brought you to the school.  The only quarrel she and I ever had was about my teaching you the Lord’s Prayer in Greek as soon as you could say father and mother.  It was to be a surprise for her on your second birthday.  On that day, while she was ironing, you took hold of her gown to steady yourself, and began, ‘IIater haemon ho en tois ohuranois,’ and to me, behind the door, it was music.  But at agiasthaeto, of which you made two syllables, you cried, and Margaret snatched you up, thinking this was some new ailment.  After I had explained to her that it was the Lord’s Prayer in Greek, she would let me take you to the school-house no more.

“Not much longer could I have taken you in any case, for already we are at the day when Adam Dishart came back.  It was the 7th of September, and all the week most of the women in Harvie had been setting off at dawn to the harvest fields and straggling home at nights, merry and with yellow corn in their hair.  I had sat on in the school-house that day after my pupils were gone.  I still meant to be a minister, and I was studying Hebrew, and so absorbed in my book that as the daylight went, I followed it step by step as far as my window, and there I read, without knowing, until I chanced to look up, that I had left my desk.  I have not opened that book since.