Chapter 9

THE WOMAN CONSIDERED IN ABSENCE--ADVENTURES OF A MILITARY CLOAK.

About six o'clock Margaret sat up suddenly in bed, with the
conviction that she had slept in. To her this was to ravel the
day: a dire thing. The last time it happened Gavin, softened by
her distress, had condensed morning worship into a sentence that
she might make up on the clock.

Her part on waking was merely to ring her bell, and so rouse Jean,
for Margaret had given Gavin a promise to breakfast in bed, and
remain there till her fire was lit. Accustomed all her life,
however, to early rising, her feet were usually on the floor
before she remembered her vow, and then it was but a step to the
window to survey the morning. To Margaret, who seldom went out,
the weather was not of great moment, while it mattered much to
Gavin, yet she always thought of it the first thing, and he not at
all until he had to decide whether his companion should be an
umbrella or a staff.

On this morning Margaret only noticed that there had been rain
since Gavin came in. Forgetting that the water obscuring the
outlook was on the other side of the panes, she tried to brush it
away with her fist. It was of the soldiers she was thinking. They
might have been awaiting her appearance at the window as their
signal to depart, for hardly had she raised the blind when they
began their march out of Thrums. From the manse she could not see
them, but she heard them, and she saw some people at the Tenements
run to their houses at sound of the drum. Other persons, less
timid, followed the enemy with execrations halfway to Tilliedrum.
Margaret, the only person, as it happened, then awake in the
manse, stood listening for some time. In the summer-seat of the
garden, however, there was another listener protected from her
sight by thin spars.

Despite the lateness of the hour Margaret was too soft-hearted to
rouse Jean, who had lain down in her clothes, trembling for her
father. She went instead into Gavin's room to look admiringly at
him as he slept. Often Gavin woke to find that his mother had
slipped in to save him the enormous trouble of opening a drawer
for a clean collar, or of pouring the water into the basin with
his own hand. Sometimes he caught her in the act of putting thick
socks in the place of thin ones, and, it must be admitted that her
passion for keeping his belongings in boxes, and the boxes in
secret places, and the secret places at the back of drawers,
occasionally led to their being lost when wanted. "They are safe,
at any rate, for I put them away some gait," was then Magaret's
comfort, but less soothing to Gavin. Yet if he upbraided her in
his hurry, it was to repent bitterly his temper the next instant,
and to