There was nothing which could definitely account for his failure; he had indeed been very busy with preparations for the Shaksperian Performances at Stratford-on-Avon, which were that year to be given by his company during the birthday week. But hard work seldom does people any harm. It was rather that he had for years been bearing a load which overtaxed his strength and at last, from sheer exhaustion, nature gave way. His old enemy, utter sleeplessness, returned to torment him, and there was nothing for it but to obey the doctor’s orders and go to Scotland for rest and change. “You are looking sorely fagged, Hugh,” was his mother’s comment when on the evening of his arrival at Callander they sat together by the fireside. It was some months since she had seen him and she was quick to note that he was hollow-cheeked and that his face, as she expressed it, “looked all eyes.” “Scottish air will soon cure me,” he said with forced cheerfulness. “I shall sleep to-night.” “Ah lad,” she said with a sigh, “and what reason is there that you should not be always breathing your native air? If you had but chosen the calling I would have had you choose, how different all might have been.” “Yes, we might now have been sitting in the most comfortable Manse,” said Macneillie, a gleam of humour lighting up his grave face. “Instead of a lean and hard-worked actor, roaming from place to place, I might have been a portly minister revered by half the neighbourhood.” “I believe you are tired of your wandering life after all,” she said, scrutinizing his careworn face with her keen eyes. “Deadly tired,” he admitted with a sigh. “But what has that to do with it? Are not half the manses in the land filled with weary men who would give anything for a change in the dull routine of the work they are called to do? It is the same with all of us, Mother. However much we love our profession there must be hard times now and again, and somehow we have got to live through them like men.” She did not reply, but silently knitted away at one of his socks, thinking to herself how different his life would have been had she had the ordering of it. He should have come to great honour, should have been a noted preacher filling a high position in Edinburgh, he should have married well, and about her in her old age troops of grandchildren should have played. As it was, his life had she felt been wrecked by the luckless taste for dramatic art which had puzzled her so much from his childhood upwards. She laid all his misfortunes to that strange and unaccountable passion for acting which she was wholly unable to comprehend. It was this which had brought him into contact with Christine Greville, this which had debarred him from marriage, this which had for years prevented him from settling down, and forced him to lead the life of a wanderer. “Hugh,” she said, “is it even now too late? Could you not give up acting and do something more worthy of your powers?”