She came to the parlour door to answer him, with her white shawl and her white cap--a light herself in the dim evening. It was perhaps too dim for him to see the expression in her eyes. She said, with a little drawing of her breath and in a startled voice, “Oh, Robbie!” “That’s no answer,” he said, impatiently. “What’s the use of it? drawing every tramp’s attention to the house. Of course it can be seen from the road.” “Ay, Robbie, that was my meaning.” “A strange meaning,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “You’d better leave it off now, mother. I don’t like such landmarks. Don’t light it any more.” Andrew stood all this time with one foot on the steps and his candle in his hand. “The mistress,” he said darkly, in a voice that came from his boots, “has a good right to her whimsey--whatever it’s for.” “Did we ask your opinion?” cried Robert, angrily. “Put out the light.” “You will do what Mr Robert bids you, Andrew,” Mrs Ogilvy said. And for the first time for fifteen years there was no light over the door of the Hewan. It was right that it should be so. Still, there was in Mrs Ogilvy’s mind a vague, unreasonable reluctance--a failing as if of some visionary hope that it might still have brought back the real Robbie, the bonnie boy she knew so well, out of the dim world in which, alas! he was now for ever and for ever lost. Robert talked much of this before he went up-stairs to bed. Perhaps he was glad to have something to talk of that was unimportant, that raised no exciting questions. “You’ve been lighting up like a lighthouse; you’ve been showing all over the country, so far as I can see. But that’ll not do for me,” he said. “I’ll have to lie low for a long time if I stay here, and no light thrown on me that can be helped. It’s different from your ways, I know, and you have a right to your whimseys, mother, as that gardener fellow says--especially as you are the one that has to pay for it all.” “Robbie,” she cried, “oh, Robbie, do not speak like that to me!” “It’s true, though. I haven’t a red cent; I haven’t a brass farthing: nothing but the clothes I’m standing in, and they are not fit to be seen.” “Robbie,” she said, “I have to go in to Edinburgh in the morning. Will you come with me and get what you want?” “Is that how it has to be done?” he said, with a laugh. “I thought you were liberal when you spoke of an outfit; but what you were thinking of was a good little boy to go with his mother, who would see he did not spend too much. No, thank you: I’ll rather continue as I am, with Andrew’s shirt.” He gave another laugh at this, pulling the corners of the collar in his hand.