“Can _you_?” cried his son. The lad was greatly agitated by the question. Ambitious Scotch youths of Colin’s type, in the state of discontent which was common to the race, had come to look upon the English universities as the goal of all possible hopes. Not that Colin would have confessed as much had his fate depended on it--but such was the fact notwithstanding. Oxford, to his mind, meant any or every possibility under heaven, without any limit to the splendour of the hopes involved. A different kind of flush, the glow of eagerness and ambition, suddenly covered his face. But joined with this came a tumult of vague but burning offence and contradiction. While he recognised the glorious chance thus opened to him, pride started up to bolt and bar those gates of hope. He turned upon his father with something like anger in his voice, with a tantalizing sense of all the advantages thus flourished wantonly, as he thought, before his eyes. “Could _you_ put up with a patron?” he repeated, looking almost fiercely in the farmer’s face; “and if not, why do you ask me such a question?” When he came to think of it, Colin felt injured by the suggestion. To be offered the thing of all others he most desired in the world, by means which made it impossible to accept the offer would have been galling enough under any circumstances; but just now, at this crisis of his youthful ambition and excitement, such a tantalizing glimpse of the possible and the impossible was beyond bearing. “Are we his dependents that he makes such an offer to me?” said the exasperated youth; and Big Colin himself looked on with a little surprise at his son’s excitement, comprehending only partially what it meant. “I’ll no say I’m fond of patronage,” said the farmer, slowly; “neither in the kirk nor out of the kirk. It’s my opinion a man does aye best that fights his own way; but there’s aye exceptions, Colin. I wouldna have you make up your mind in any arbitrary way. As for Sir Thomas, he has aye been real civil and friendly--no one of your condescending fine gentlemen--and the son--” “What right have I to any favour from Sir Thomas?” cried Colin. “He is nothing to me. I did no more for young Frankland than I would have done for any dog on the hillside,” he continued, with a contemptuous tone; and then his conscience reproved him. “I don’t mean to say anything against _him_. He behaved like a man, and saved himself,” said Colin, with haughty candour. “As for all this pretence of rewarding me, it feels like an insult. I want nothing at their hands.”