He looked into the fair, tender face and the eager, questioning eyes, and found himself unable to reply.

“Remember, Colin!  I give you a rendezvous in heaven.”

He clasped her hand tightly, and they walked on in a silence that Colin remembered often afterwards.  Sometimes, in dreams, to the very end of his life, he took again with Helen that last evening walk, and his soul leaned and hearkened after hers.  “I give you a rendezvous in heaven!”

In the morning they had a few more words alone.  She was standing looking out thoughtfully into the garden.  “Are you going to London?” she asked suddenly.

“Yes.”

“You will call on Mr. Selwyn?”

“I think so.”

“Tell him we remember him—­and try to follow, though afar off, the example he sets us.”

“Well, you know, Helen, I may not see him.  We never were chums.  I have often wondered why I asked him here.  It was all done in a moment.  I had thought of asking Walter Napier, and then I asked Selwyn.  I have often thought it would have pleased me better if I had invited Walter.”

“Sometimes it is permitted to us to do things for the pleasure of others, rather than our own.  I have often thought that God—­who foresaw the changes to take place here—­sent Mr. Selwyn with a message to Dominie Tallisker.  The dominie thinks so too.  Then how glad you ought to be that you asked him.  He came to prepare for those poor people who as yet were scattered over Ayrshire and Cumberland.  And this thought comforts me for you, Colin.  God knows just where you are going, dear, and the people you are going to meet, and all the events that will happen to you.”

The events and situations of life resemble ocean waves—­every one is alike and yet every one is different.  It was just so at Crawford Keep after Colin left it.  The usual duties of the day were almost as regular as the clock, but little things varied them.  There were letters or no letters from Colin; there were little events at the works or in the village; the dominie called or he did not call.  Occasionally there were visitors connected with the mines or furnaces, and sometimes there were social evening gatherings of the neighboring young people, or formal state dinners for the magistrates and proprietors who were on terms of intimacy with the laird.

For the first year of Colin’s absence, if his letters were not quite satisfactory, they were condoned.  It did not please his father that Colin seemed to have settled himself so completely in Rome, among “artists and that kind o’ folk,” and he was still more angry when Colin declared his intention of staying away another year.  Poor father!  How he had toiled and planned to aggrandize this only son, who seemed far more delighted with an old coin or an old picture than with the great works which bore his name.  In all manner of ways he had made it clear to his family that in the dreamy, sensuous atmosphere of Italian life he remembered the gray earnestness of Scottish life with a kind of terror.