‘Gang the gait thysel, Girzy Hypel,’ said Claud, raising his head, ‘and no fash me with thy clishmaclavers.’ ‘Heh, gudeman! but ye hae been eating sourrocks instead o’ lang-kail. But e’en’s ye like, Meg dorts, as “Patie and Rodger” says, I can gang mysel;’ and with that, whisking pettishly round, she walked away. Claud being thus disturbed in his meditations, looked after her as she moved along the footpath down the slope, and for the space of a minute or two, appeared inclined to follow her, but relapsing into some new train of thought, before she had reached the bottom, he had again resumed his common attitude, and replaced his chin on the ivory head of his staff. CHAPTER XXXIV There are times in life when every man feels as if his sympathies were extinct. This arises from various causes; sometimes from vicissitudes of fortune; sometimes from the sense of ingratitude, which, like the canker in the rose, destroys the germ of all kindness and charity; often from disappointments in affairs of the heart, which leave it incapable of ever again loving; but the most common cause is the consciousness of having committed wrong, when the feelings recoil inward, and, by some curious mystery in the nature of our selfishness, instead of prompting atonement, irritate us to repeat and to persevere in our injustice. Into one of these temporary trances Claud had fallen when his wife left him; and he continued sitting, with his eyes riveted on the ground, insensible to all the actual state of life, contemplating the circumstances and condition of his children, as if he had no interest in their fate, nor could be affected by any thing in their fortunes. In this fit of apathy and abstraction, he was roused by the sound of some one approaching; and on looking up, and turning his eyes towards the path which led from the house to the bench where he was then sitting, he saw Walter coming. There was something unwonted in the appearance and gestures of Walter, which soon interested the old man. At one moment he rushed forward several steps, with a strange wildness of air. He would then stop and wring his hands, gaze upward as if he wondered at some extraordinary phenomenon in the sky; but seeing nothing, he dropped his hands, and, at his ordinary pace, came slowly up the hill. When he arrived within a few paces of the bench, he halted and looked with such an open and innocent sadness that even the heart of his father, which so shortly before was as inert to humanity as case-hardened iron, throbbed with pity, and was melted to a degree of softness and compassion, almost entirely new to its sensibilities. ‘What’s the matter wi’ thee, Watty?’ said he, with unusual kindliness. The poor natural, however, made no reply,--but continued to gaze at him with the same inexpressible simplicity of grief. ‘Hast t’ou lost ony thing, Watty?’--‘I dinna ken,’ was the answer, followed by a burst of tears.