Despite the lateness of the hour Margaret was too soft-hearted to rouse Jean, who had lain down in her clothes, trembling for her father.  She went instead into Gavin’s room to look admiringly at him as he slept.  Often Gavin woke to find that his mother had slipped in to save him the enormous trouble of opening a drawer for a clean collar, or of pouring the water into the basin with his own hand.  Sometimes he caught her in the act of putting thick socks in the place of thin ones, and, it must be admitted that her passion for keeping his belongings in boxes, and the boxes in secret places, and the secret places at the back of drawers, occasionally led to their being lost when wanted.  “They are safe, at any rate, for I put them away some gait,” was then Magaret’s comfort, but less soothing to Gavin.  Yet if he upbraided her in his hurry, it was to repent bitterly his temper the next instant, and to feel its effects more than she, temper being a weapon that we hold by the blade.  When he awoke and saw her in his room he would pretend, unless he felt called upon to rage at her for self-neglect, to be still asleep, and then be filled with tenderness for her.  A great writer has spoken sadly of the shock it would be to a mother to know her boy as he really is, but I think she often knows him better than he is known to cynical friends.  We should be slower to think that the man at his worst is the real man, and certain that the better we are ourselves the less likely is he to be at his worst in our company.  Every time he talks away his own character before us he is signifying contempt for ours.

On this morning Margaret only opened Gavin’s door to stand and look, for she was fearful of awakening him after his heavy night.  Even before she saw that he still slept she noticed with surprise that, for the first time since he came to Thrums, he had put on his shutters.  She concluded that he had done this lest the light should rouse him.  He was not sleeping pleasantly, for now he put his open hand before his face, as if to guard himself, and again he frowned and seemed to draw back from something.  He pointed his finger sternly to the north, ordering the weavers, his mother thought, to return to their homes, and then he muttered to himself so that she heard the words, “And if thy right hand offend thee cut it off, and cast it from thee, for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.”  Then suddenly he bent forward, his eyes open and fixed on the window.  Thus he sat, for the space of half a minute, like one listening with painful intentness.  When he lay back Margaret slipped away.  She knew he was living the night over again, but not of the divit his right hand had cast, nor of the woman in the garden.

Gavin was roused presently by the sound of voices from Margaret’s room, where Jean, who had now gathered much news, was giving it to her mistress.  Jean’s cheerfulness would have told him that her father was safe had he not wakened to thoughts of the Egyptian.  I suppose he was at the window in an instant, unsnibbing the shutters and looking out as cautiously as a burglar might have looked in.  The Egyptian was gone from the summer-seat.  He drew a great breath.