Doubtless his mother's grief had been the same as grannie's--the fear that she would lose her husband for ever.

The hourly fresh griefs from neglect and wrong did not occur to him; only the never never more.

He looked no farther, took the portrait from his neck and replaced it with the paper, put the box back, and walled it up in solitude once more with the dusty bundles.

Then he went down to his grandmother, sadder and more desolate than ever.
He found her seated in her usual place.

Her New Testament, a large-print octavo, lay on the table beside her unopened; for where within those boards could she find comfort for a grief like hers?
That it was the will of God might well comfort any suffering of her own, but would it comfort Andrew?
and if there was no comfort for Andrew, how was Andrew's mother to be comforted?
Yet God had given his first-born to save his brethren: how could he be pleased that she should dry her tears and be comforted?
True, some awful unknown force of a necessity with which God could not cope came in to explain it; but this did not make God more kind, for he knew it all every time he made a man; nor man less sorrowful, for God would have his very mother forget him, or, worse still, remember him and be happy.
'Read a chapter till me, laddie,' she said.
Robert opened and read till he came to the words: 'I pray not for the world.' 'He was o' the world,' said the old woman; 'and gin Christ wadna pray for him, what for suld I ?' Already, so soon after her son's death, would her theology begin to harden her heart.