“Laddie, that was like Kirsty!  Heard you what the roaring farmer o’ Double Dykes said?”

No, Tommy had not heard him mentioned.  And indeed the roaring farmer of Double Dykes had said nothing.  He was already lying very quiet on the south side of the cemetery.

Tommy’s mother’s next question cost her a painful effort.  “Did you hear,” she asked, “whether they telled Aaron Latta about the letter?”

“Yes, they telled him,” Tommy replied, “and he said a queer thing; he said, ‘Jean Myles is dead, I was at her coffining.’  That’s what he aye says when they tell him there’s another letter.  I wonder what he means, mother?”

“I wonder!” she echoed, faintly.  The only pleasure left her was to raise the envy of those who had hooted her from Thrums, but she paid a price for it.  Many a stab she had got from the unwitting Tommy as he repeated the gossip of his new friends, and she only won their envy at the cost of their increased ill-will.  They thought she was lording it in London, and so they were merciless; had they known how poor she was and how ill, they would have forgotten everything save that she was a Thrummy like themselves, and there were few but would have shared their all with her.  But she did not believe this, and therefore you may pity her, for the hour was drawing near, and she knew it, when she must appeal to some one for her children’s sake, not for her own.

No, not for her own.  When Tommy was wandering the pretty parts of London with James Gloag and other boys from Thrums Street in search of Jean Myles, whom they were to know by her carriage and her silk dress and her son in blue velvet, his mother was in bed with bronchitis in the wretched room we know of, or creeping to the dancing school, coughing all the way.

Some of the fits of coughing were very near being her last, but she wrestled with her trouble, seeming at times to stifle it, and then for weeks she managed to go to her work, which was still hers, because Shovel’s old girl did it for her when the bronchitis would not be defied.  Shovel’s old slattern gave this service unasked and without payment; if she was thanked it was ungraciously, but she continued to do all she could when there was need; she smelled of gin, but she continued to do all she could.

The wardrobe had been put upon its back on the floor, and so converted into a bed for Tommy and Elspeth, who were sometimes wakened in the night by a loud noise, which alarmed them until they learned that it was only the man in the next room knocking angrily on the wall because their mother’s cough kept him from sleeping.

Tommy knew what death was now, and Elspeth knew its name, and both were vaguely aware that it was looking for their mother; but if she could only hold out till Hogmanay, Tommy said, they would fleg it out of the house.  Hogmanay is the mighty winter festival of Thrums, and when it came round these two were to give their mother a present that would make her strong.  It was not to be a porous plaster.  Tommy knew now of something better than that.