"He's tellin' ye to come in, Annie," said Jean, as if she had been interpreting his words. But she detained her nevertheless to ask several unimportant questions. At length the voice of Thomas rousing her once more, she hastened to introduce her. "Gang in there, Annie," she said, throwing open the door of the dark room. The child entered and stood just within it, not knowing even where Thomas sat. But a voice came to her out of the gloom: "Ye're no feared at the dark, are ye, Annie? Come in." "I dinna ken whaur I'm gaein." "Never min' that. Come straucht foret. I'm watchin' ye." For Thomas had been sitting in the dark till he could see in it (which, however, is not an invariable result), while out of the little light Annie had come into none at all But she obeyed the voice, and went straight forward into the dark, evidently much to the satisfaction of Thomas, who seizing her arm with one hand, laid the other, horny and heavy, on her head, saying: "Noo, my lass, ye'll ken what faith means. Whan God tells ye to gang into the mirk, gang!" "But I dinna like the mirk," said Annie. "No human sowl _can_," responded Thomas. "Jean, fess a can'le direckly." Now Thomas was an enemy to everything that could be, justly or unjustly, called _superstition_; and this therefore was not the answer that might have been expected of him. But he had begun with the symbolic and mystical in his reception of Annie, and perhaps there was something in the lovely childishness of her unconscious faith (while she all the time thought herself a dreadful unbeliever) that kept Thomas to the simplicities of the mystical part of his nature. Besides, Thomas's mind was a rendezvous for all extremes. In him they met, and showed that they met by fighting all day long. If you knocked at his inner door, you never could tell what would open it to you--all depending on what happened to be _uppermost_ in the wrestle. The candle was brought and set on the table, showing two or three geranium plants in the window. Why her eyes should have fixed upon these, Annie tried to discover afterwards, when she was more used to thinking. But she could not tell, except it were that they were so scraggy and wretched, half drowned in the darkness, and half blanched by the miserable light, and therefore must have been very like her own feelings, as she stood before the ungentle but not unkind stone-mason. "Weel, lassie," said he, when Jean had retired, "what do ye want wi' me?" Annie burst into tears again. "Jean, gae butt the hoose direckly," cried Thomas, on the mere chance of his attendant having lingered at the door. And the sound of her retreating footsteps, though managed with all possible care, immediately justified his suspicion. This interruption turned Annie's tears aside, and when Thomas spoke next, she was able to reply. "Noo, my bairn," he said, "what's the maitter?" "I was at the missionar kirk last nicht," faltered Annie.