The old lady looked at him approvingly. "Ye're no a Whig. There's guid bluid in ye," she said, irrelevantly. "Yes, I do remember now," broke in Ralph eagerly. "I remember what John Bairdieson said. 'Sit doon, minister,' he said, 'gin yer ready to flee up to the blue bauks'" [rafters--said of hens going to rest at nights]; "'there's a heap o' folk in this congregation that's no juist sae ready yet.'" Ralph saw that Winsome and her grandmother were both genuinely interested in his father. "Ye maun mind that I yince kenned yer faither as weel as e'er I kenned a son o' mine, though it's mony an' mony a year sin' he was i' this hoose." Winsome looked curiously at her grandmother. "Aye, lassie," she said, "ye may look an' look, but the faither o' him there cam as near to bein' your ain faither--" Walter Skirving, swathed in his chair, turned his solemn and awful face from the window, as though called back to life by his wife's words. "Silence, woman!" he thundered. But Mistress Skirving did not look in the least put out; only she was discreetly silent for a minute or two after her husband had spoken, as was her wont, and then she proceeded: "Aye, brawly I kenned Gilbert Peden, when he used to come in at that door, wi' his black curls ower his broo as crisp an' bonny as his son's the day." Winsome looked at the door with an air of interest. "Did he come to see you, grandmammy?" she asked. "Aye, aye, what else?--juist as muckle as this young man here comes to see me. I had the word o' baith o' them for't. Ralph Peden says that he comes to see me, an' sae did the faither o' him--" Again Mistress Skirving paused, for she was aware that her husband had turned on her one of his silent looks. "Drive on aboot yer faither an' John Rorrison," she said; "it's verra entertainin'." "Bairdieson," said Winsome, correctingly. Ralph, now reassured that he was interesting Winsome as well, went on more briskly. Winsome had slipped down beside her grandmother, and had laid her arm across her grandmother's knees till the full curve of her breast touched the spare outlines of the elder woman. Ralph wondered if Winsome would ever in the years to come be like her grandmother. He thought that he could love her a thousand times more then. "My father," said Ralph, "is a man much beloved by his congregation, for he is a very father to them in all their troubles; but they give him a kind of adoration in return that would not be good for any other kind of man except my father. They think him no less than infallible. 'Dinna mak' a god o' yer minister,' he tells them, but they do it all the same." Winsome looked as if she did not wonder. "When I kenned yer faither," said the old dame, "he wad hae been nocht the waur o' a pickle mair o' the auld Adam in him. It's a rale usefu' commodity in this life--" "Why, grandmother--" began Winsome.