This was a very strong supplementary argument to strengthen the resistance of his conscience. And he did not give in; he preferred to go home with his mother, to take, as all his advisers entreated him, time to think everything over. Rob had no objections to take a little time. He wanted money to take him to London, to start him in life, even to pay off the debts which he said nothing of, but which weighed quite as heavily upon him as his troubles of conscience. This was how he came to be, after such a long interval, once more living with his mother at Earl’s-hall farm. He had come home in all the importance of a sceptical hero, a position very dazzling to the simple mind, and very attractive to many honest people. But it was not so pleasant at home. Instead of being the centre of anxious solicitude, instead of being plied by conciliatory arguments, coaxed and persuaded, and respected and sympathized with, he found himself the object of his mother’s irony, and treated with a contemptuous impatience which he fain would have called bigotry and intolerance. Mrs. Glen was not at all respectful of honest doubt, and she had a thorough contempt for anything and everything that kept a man from making his way in the world. She was not indeed a person of refinement at all. She had lived a hard life, struggling to bring up her children and to “push them forrit,” as she said. The expression was homely, and the end to be obtained perhaps not very elevated. To “push forrit” your son to be Lord Chancellor, or even a general officer, or a bishop, is a fine thing, which strikes the spectator; but when all you can do is to push him “forrit” to a shop in Dundee, is the struggle less noble? It is less imposing, at all events. And the struggling mother who had done her best to procure such rise in life and in comfort as was within her reach for her children was not a person of noble mind or generous understanding. When Rob came home, upon whom her highest hopes had been set, not prosperous like the others, but a failure and disappointment, doing nothing, earning nothing, and with no prospect before him of either occupation or gain, her mortification made her bitter. Fury and disappointment filled her heart. She kept silent for the first day, only going about her household affairs with angry energy, scolding her servants, and as they said, “dinging everything about.” “So lang as she disna ding me!” said Jean the dairy-maid; but it was not to be expected that any long time should pass before she began to “ding” some one, and ere long the culprit himself began to feel the force of her trouble.