"Father, father, ye'll brak the hert o' me!" she almost yelled, and laid
the child on the top of her father's hands in the very act of drawing his
waxed ends.
Thus changing him perforce from cobbler to nurse, she bolted from the
kitchen, and up the little stair; and throwing herself on her knees by the
bedside, sought, instinctively and unconsciously, the presence of him who
sees in secret. But for a time she had nothing to say even to _him_, and
could only moan on in the darkness beneath her closed eyelids.
Suddenly she came to herself, remembering that she too had abandoned her
child: she must go back to him!
But as she ran, she heard loud noises of infantile jubilation, and
re-entering the kitchen, was amazed to see the soutar's hands moving as
persistently if not quite so rapidly as before: the child hung at the back
of the soutar's head, in the bight of the long jack-towel from behind the
door, holding on by the gray hair of his occiput. There he tugged and
crowed, while his care-taker bent over his labour, circumspect in every
movement, nor once forgetting the precious thing on his back, who was
evidently delighted with his new style of being nursed, and only now and
then made a wry face at some movement of the human machine too abrupt for
his comfort.
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