Only the beginnings, I say, for every scheme ran tilt against the obvious truth that I was not only without affection or regard out there, but without as much as a crown of money to purchase the semblance of either. I could not have stood very long there when my father came out, his face like clay, and aged miraculously, and beckoned me to the parlour. “Your mother--my wife,” said he, “is very ill, and I am sending for the doctor. The horse is yoking. There is another woman in Driepps who--God help her!--will be no better this night, but I wish in truth her case was ours, and that it was you who lay among the heather.” He began pacing up and down the floor, his eyes bent, his hands continually wringing, his heart bursting, as it were, with sighs and the dry sobs of the utmost wretchedness. As for me, I must have been clean gyte (as the saying goes), for my attention was mostly taken up with the tassel of his nightcap that bobbed grotesquely on his brow. I had not seen it since, as a child, I used to share his room. “What! what!” he cried at last piteously, “have ye never a word to say? Are ye dumb?” He ran at me and caught me by the collar of the coat and tried to shake me in an anger, but I felt it no more than I had been a stone. “What did ye do it for? What in heaven's name did ye quarrel on?” “It was--it was about a girl,” I said, reddening even at that momentous hour to speak of such a thing to him. “A girl!” he repeated, tossing up his hands. “Keep us! Hoo lang are ye oot o' daidlies? Well! well!” he went on, subduing himself and prepared to listen. I wished the tassel had been any other colour than crimson, and hung fairer on the middle of his forehead; it seemed to fascinate me. And he, belike, forgot that I was there, for he thought, I knew, continually of his wife, and he would stop his feverish pacing on the floor, and hearken for a sound from the room where she was quartered with the maid. I made no answer. “Well, well!” he cried again fiercely, turning upon me. “Out with it; out with the whole hellish transaction, man!” And then I told him in detail what before my mother I had told in a brief abstract. How that I had met young Borland coming down the breast of the brae at Kirkillstane last night and-- “Last night!” he cried. “Are ye havering? I saw ye go to your bed at ten, and your boots were in the kitchen.” It was so, I confessed. I had gone to my room but not to bed, and had slipped out by the window when the house was still, with Uncle Andrew's shoes. “Oh, lad!” he cried, “it's Andy's shoes you stand in sure enough, for I have seen him twenty years syne in the plight that you are in this night. Merciful heaven! what dark blotch is in the history of this family of ours that it must ever be embroiled in crimes of passion and come continually to broken ends of fortune? I have lived stark honest and humble, fearing the Lord; the covenants have I kept, and still and on it seems I must beget a child of the Evil One!”