He started at breakneck speed down the street. The brother looked after him silently, his jaw loose with wonder. He pushed aside the little gate in front of the garden and though he knocked at the door, he tried it, so impatient was he for entry, and finding it on the latch, he opened it as a gust of wind might. In the hall he met her coming to answer the knock, and suddenly as he saw her, all the bluster and the heartiness went out of him, and his knees turned to water and there was a great catch in his throat. He wanted to see her only, but the baby she had on her arm was she also, both of them one. It suddenly occurred to him that he too was a part of her, all three of them one. And he felt suddenly as Saul must have felt when, going toward Damascus, he was stricken to the earth. She smiled at his perturbation. "I 'm glad to see you, Aleck." Calmly she shifted the child to her left arm. She put out her hand to him and he caught it and held on to it as a foundering sailor hangs on to a thrown line. She led him to the parlor. "Have you no word," she smiled, "for me and this wee fellow o' yours?" He looked at the both of them, she more like Ceres, the autumn spirit, than ever, buxom and wise and calmly happy, and the little thing of down and fluttering life in her arms, soft as a newly hatched chick, he sensed. "When," he asked, and his voice in his own ears was hoarse as the cawing of a rook, "when are you going to marry me?" "I 'm no' so sure," she said calmly, "that I 'm going to marry you at all." "You 're going to marry me, Jeanie, and I 'll start the mill again, and we 'll all be fine--" "And you 'll gi'e the working people the raises they're entitled to?" "I will not," he flashed out suddenly, as of old. "They 're entitled to nothing." "Then I'll ha' nothing to do wi' you." She looked at him calmly. "Nor will this wee fellow. I 'm a working-woman, Aleck, and he 's a working-woman's son. We 're no' your kind." He saw the baby's face now, crumpled with sleep. Very like an old man's face it seemed to him, and yet there was something indefinably pulling about it. "The wee workin'-fellow!" There was such a pathetic touch to the idea. "By God!" he blurted suddenly. "I'll gi'e them the mill!" She smiled again. "The wee thing then was missing in you, Aleck--I think you got it now. And I 'll marry you, Aleck, just when you say. It's no' too soon," she added simply. For a minute he was sunk in abstraction while she patted his hand with the old, familiar gesture. He raised his head and spoke with conviction. "You know, Jeanie, you know, it's queer to think that an hour ago I had no idea of all this. You and thon wee fellow, and the mill's working again and a' right between me and the men. I had made an end, and now there 'll be no end. You know, it seems ordained in a manner of speaking. Ay, as it were, ordained. It does," he said. "It does that. Ay, indeed. It does so." THE KEEPER OF THE BRIDGE I