Not once yielding the right hand of the boy which was clasped to and in his own, the laird closed the door of the room, and advancing the whole length of it, stopped at a sofa covered with a rich brocade, and seating himself thereon, slowly, and with a kind of care, drew him between his thin knees, and began to talk to him. Now there was this difference between the relation of these two and that of most fathers and sons, that, thus taken into solemn solitude by his old father, the boy felt no dismay, no sense of fault to be found, no troubled expectation of admonition. Reverence and love held about equal sway in his feeling towards his father. And while the grandmother looked down on Cosmo as the son of his mother, for that very reason his father in a strange lovely way reverenced his boy: the reaction was utter devotion. Cosmo stood and looked in his father’s eyes--their eyes were of the same colour--that bright sweet soft Norwegian blue--his right hand still clasped in his father’s left, and his left hand leaning gently on his father’s knee. Then, as I say, the old man began to talk to the young one. A silent man ordinarily, it was from no lack of the power of speech, for he had a Celtic gift of simple eloquence. “This is your birthday, my son.” “Yes, papa.” “You are now fourteen.” “Yes, papa.” “You are growing quite a man.” “I don’t know, papa.” “So much of a man, at least, my Cosmo, that I am going to treat you like a man this day, and tell you some things that I have never talked about to any one since your mother’s death.--You remember your mother, Cosmo?” This question he was scarcely ever alone with the boy without asking--not from forgetfulness, but from the desire to keep the boy’s remembrance of her fresh, and for the pure pleasure of talking of her to the only one with whom it did not seem profane to converse concerning his worshipped wife. “Yes, papa, I do.” The laird always spoke Scotch to his mother, and to Grizzie also, who would have thought him seriously offended had he addressed her in book-English; but to his Marion’s son he always spoke in the best English he had, and Cosmo did his best in the same way in return. “Tell me what you remember about her,” said the old man. He had heard the same thing again and again from the boy, yet every time it was as if he hoped and watched for some fresh revelation from the lips of the lad--as if, truth being one, memory might go on recalling, as imagination goes on foreseeing. “I remember,” said the boy, “a tall beautiful woman, with long hair, which she brushed before a big, big looking-glass.”