23

throwing the great coat over him, fled back into the house. There never
was a night like that, at Grangehead. Mr. John slept on the gravel plot,
Mr. Malcolm slept by the dining room fire, and the Colonel sat up all
night in his own room in meditation and religious exercise. There was no
tea, and no family worship.

Chapter VII

The colonel hung his head from that day forward. He turned suddenly
and surprisingly bald; there were broken tones in the his voice; and his
face she seemed to have shrunk; and he sometimes smiled wanderingly.
Malcolm never uttered the John's name of his own in his uncle's presence;
but he thought of him often enough, as he looked upon these changes. The
peer old man had been stabbed to the heart; the vital spring was broken;
he was dying slower or faster, he was dying.

There can be no doubt that he kept up an acquaintance with John's
life, and secretly helped him and would have taken him back if he had been
given a chance. But if he was pleased at rendering assistance, he must have
been deeply pained by all he heard; every bulletin must have been another
cowardly blow on his white hairs; for John's new life was one of which
the Colonel could not but condemn. It-is-a-pitiful

The end came, when the two lads were in their twenty first year; John
set writing leader-notes in a London Newspaper; and Malcolm agreeably con-
scious of his approaching marriage with Mary Rolland. The Colonel took to his
bed rather suddenly. It was wild windy weather, and the sky was full of fly-

ing vapours. He stood had been looking out all-afternoon of the window
about-three-o'clock-in-the all afternoon; and towards dusk he called
Malcolm and pointed to the labouring trees, and the dead leaves whirling in
the open.

"I am too old and tired for this sort of thing." he said, "I think I'll
go to bed." He looked at Malcolm queerly. "I don't mean to get up again,"
he added. And he kept his word.

The words here underscored are in the manuscript added in pencil by Stevenson
as revision.