There was the blood of Covenanters in Willy Cameron's mother, a high courage of sacrifice, and an exceedingly shrewd brain. She lay awake that night, carefully planning, and when everything was arranged in orderly fashion in her mind, she lighted her lamp and carried it to the door of Willy's room. He lay diagonally across his golden-oak bed, for he was very long, and sleep had rubbed away the tragic lines about his mouth. She closed his door and went back to her bed.
"I've seen too much of it," she reflected, without bitterness. She stared around the room. "Too much of it," she repeated. And crawled heavily back into bed, a determined little figure, rather chilled.
The next morning she expressed a desire to spend a few months with her brother in California.
"I coughed all last winter, after I had the flu," she explained, "and James has been wanting me this long time. I don't want to leave you, that's all, Willy. If you were in the city it would be different."
He was frankly bewildered and a little hurt, to tell the truth. He no more suspected her of design than of crime.
"Of course you are going," he said, heartily. "It's the very thing. But I like the way you desert your little son!"
"I've been thinking about that, too," she said, pouring his coffee. "I--if you were in the city, now, there would always be something to do."
He shot her a suspicious glance, but her face was without evidence of guile.
"What would I do in the city?"
"They use chemists in the mills, don't they?"
"A fat chance I'd have for that sort of job," he scoffed. "No city for me, mother."
But she knew. She read his hesitation accurately, the incredulous pause of the bird whose cage door is suddenly opened. He would go.
"I'd think about it, anyhow, Willy."
But for a long time after he had gone she sat quietly rocking in her rocking chair in the bay window of the sitting room. It was a familiar attitude of hers, homely, middle-class, and in a way symbolic. Had old Anthony Cardew ever visualized so imaginative a thing as a Nemesis, he would probably have summoned a vision of a huddled figure in his stable-yard, dying, and cursing him as he died. Had Jim Doyle, cunningly plotting the overthrow of law and order, been able in his arrogance to conceive of such a thing, it might have been Anthony Cardew he saw. Neither of them, for a moment, dreamed of it as an elderly Scotch Covenanter, a plain little womanly figure, rocking in a cane-seated rocking chair, and making the great sacrifice of her life.