Page:Ralph Connor - The man from Glengarry.djvu/196

  like this for three years, and ought to have been cleared long ago, if I had been doing my duty."

"Indeed, it will burn all the better for that," said his brother, cheerfully. "And as for the potatoes, there is a bit of my clearing that Ranald might as well use.

But Black Hugh shook his head. "Ranald will use no man's clearing but his own," he said. "I am afraid he has got too much of his father in him for his own good."

Macdonald Bhain glanced at his brother's face with a look of mingled pity and admiration. "Ah," he said, "Hugh, it's a proud man you are. Macdonalds have plenty of that, whatever, and we come by it good enough. Do you remember at home, when our father"—and he went off into a reminiscence of their boyhood days, talking in gentle, kindly, loving tones, till the shadow began to lift from his brother's face, and he, too, began to talk. They spoke of their father, who had always been to them a kind of hero; and of their mother, who had lived, and toiled, and suffered for her family with uncomplaining patience.

"She was a good woman," said Macdonald Bhain, with a note of tenderness in his voice. "And it was the hard load she had to bear, and I would to God she were living now, that I might make up to her something of what she suffered for me."

"And I am thankful to God," said his brother, bitterly, "that she is not here to see me now, for it would but add to the heavy burden I often laid upon her."