“But suppose there is nothing I would like--and suppose I was just on your hands a helpless lump----” “I will suppose no such thing,” she said, with the tears coming to her eyes; “why should I suppose that of _my_ son? No, no! no, no! You are young yet, and in all your strength, the Lord be praised! You might have come back to me with the life crushed out of you, like Willie Miller; or worn with that weary India, and the heat and the work, like Mrs Allender’s son in the Glen. But you, Robbie----” “What would you have done with me,” he repeated, insisting, though with a half smile on his face, “if it had been as bad as that--if I had come to you like them?” “Why should we think of that that is not, nor is like to be? Oh! my dear, I would have done the best I could with a sore heart. I would just have done my best, and pinched a little and scraped a little, and put forth my little skill to make you comfortable on what there was.” “You have every air of being very comfortable yourself,” he said, looking round the room. “I thought so when I came first. You are like the man in the proverb--the parable, I mean--whose very servants had enough and to spare, while his son perished with hunger.” She was a little surprised by what he said, but did not yet attach any very serious meaning to it. “I am better off,” she said, “than when you went away. Some things that I’ve been mixed up in have done very well, so they tell me. I never have spent what came in like that. I have saved it all up for you, Robbie.” “Not for me, mother,” he said; “to please yourself with the thought that there was more money in the bank.” “Robbie,” she said, “you cannot be thinking what you are saying. That was never my character. There is nobody that does not try to save for their bairns. I have saved for you, when I knew not where you were, nor if I would ever see you more. The money in the bank was never what I was thinking of. There would be enough to give you, perhaps, a good beginning--whatever you might settle to do.” “Set me up in business, in fact,” he said, with a laugh. “That is what would please you best.”