“Mother, this is Mr. Richard Carvell heir to Carvel Hall in Maryland,—­a young gentleman whom I have had the honour to rescue from a slaver.”

I bowed low, such was my respect for Dame Paul, and she rose and curtseyed.  She wore a widow’s cap and a black gown, and I saw in her deep-lined face a resemblance to her son.

“Madam,” I said, the title coming naturally, “I owe Captain Paul a debt I can never repay.”

“An’ him but a laddie!” she cried.  “I’m thankful, John, I’m thankful for his mither that ye saved him.”

“I have no mother, Madam Paul,” said I, “and my father was killed in the French war.  But I have a grandfather who loves me dearly as I love him.”

Some impulse brought her forward, and she took both my hands in her own.

“Ye’ll forgive an auld woman, sir,” she said, with a dignity that matched her son’s, “but ye’re sae young, an’ ye hae sic a leuk in yere bonny gray e’e that I ken yell aye be a true friend o’ John’s.  He’s been a guid sin to me, an’ ye maunna reek what they say o’ him.”

When now I think of the triumph John Paul has achieved, of the scoffing world he has brought to his feet, I cannot but recall that sorrowful evening in the gardener’s cottage, when a son was restored but to be torn away.  The sisters came in from their day’s work,—­both well-favoured lasses, with John’s eyes and hair,—­and cooked the simple meal of broth and porridge, and the fowl they had kept so long against the captain’s home-coming.  He carved with many a light word that cost him dear.  Did Janet reca’ the simmer nights they had supped here, wi’ the bumclocks bizzin’ ower the candles?  And was Nancy, the cow, still i’ the byre?  And did the bees still give the same bonnie hiney, and were the red apples still in the far orchard?  Ay, Meg had thocht o’ him that autumn, and ran to fetch them with her apron to her face, to come back smiling through her tears.  So it went; and often a lump would rise in my throat that I could not eat, famished as I was, and the mother and sisters scarce touched a morsel of the feast.

The one never failing test of a son, my dears, lies in his treatment of his mother, and from that hour forth I had not a doubt of John Paul.  He was a man who had seen the world and become, in more than one meaning of the word, a gentleman.  Whatever foibles he may have had, he brought no conscious airs and graces to this lowly place, but was again the humble gardener’s boy.

But time pressed, as it ever does.  The hour came for us to leave, John Paul firmly refusing to remain the night in a house that belonged to Mr. Craik.  Of the tenderness, nay, of the pity and cruelty of that parting, I have no power to write.  We knelt with bowed heads while the mother prayed for the son, expatriated, whom she never hoped to see again on this earth.  She gave us bannocks of her own baking, and her last words were to implore me always to be a friend to John Paul.