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The back walls of the warping department fell into the yard, while the upper part of the front walls fell in. The machines were six feet from the walls. The girls crouched under their machines and escaped serious injury. Several fainted and were carried out by foremen. Amelia Davis, a warper, was hit on the head by a brick as she hurried from the second floor.
Aaron tried to rise, but was pushed back into his chair. "Love cannot die," cried Tommy, triumphantly, like the fairy in the pantomime; "love is always young " He stopped in mid-career at sight of Aaron's disappointing face. "Are you done?" the warper inquired.
So Tommy's schoolmates reported at home, and the dominie had to acknowledge its truth to Aaron. "I wish you would give that sacket a thrashing for me," he said, half furiously, yet with a grin on his face, one day when he and the warper chanced to meet on the Monypenny road. "I'll no lay a hand on bairn o' Jean Myles," Aaron replied.
His calmness gave him a kind of dignity. "Did I ever say you was a shamed man, Aaron?" "Am I not?" the warper asked quietly; and Auchterlonie hung his head. Aaron continued, still turning the handle, "You're truthful, and you canna deny it. Nor will you deny that I shamed you and every other mother's son that night.
He had made no mistake about the warper, however. Aaron was gone, and ten days elapsed before he was again seen in Thrums. No one in Thrums ever got a word from Aaron Latta about how he spent those ten days, and Tommy and Elspeth, whom he brought back with him, also tried to be reticent, but some of the women were too clever for them. Jean and Aaron did not meet again.
The stone was no longer at the Cuttle Well. As the easiest way of obliterating the words, the minister had ordered it to be broken, and of the pieces another mason had made stands for watches, one of which was now in Thrums Street. "Aaron Latta ain't a mason now," Tommy rattled on: "he is a warper, because he can warp in his own house without looking on mankind or speaking to mankind.
"Though I would a hantle rather," continued the warper, "waur my money on Elspeth." "What you spend on him," Miss Ailie argued, "you will really be spending on her, for if he rises in the world he will not leave Elspeth behind. You are prejudiced against him, but you cannot deny that."
Her grandfather taught it to her before he died, and I want to write it down. Do you like poetry, Mercy?" "Can't say as I do," confessed the warper. She was a fair, tall girl. "I like novels," she added. "I love stories, but I haven't got much use for rhymes." "Stories about what?" asked Estelle. "I have a sort of an idea to start a library, if I can persuade my father to let me.
"Aaron," said Tommy, in the hush that had fallen on that house since quiet Elspeth left it, "I have never thanked you in words for all that you have done for me and Elspeth." "Dinna do it now, then," replied the warper, fidgeting. "I must," Tommy said cheerily, "I must"; and he did, while Aaron scowled. "It was never done for you," Aaron informed him, "nor for the father you are the marrows o'."
The old warper laughed unpleasantly at that. "And I'se uphaud," he said, "you're none sure but what shell tak' him! You're no as sure she'll refuse him as that there's a sun in the heavens, and I'm a broken man." For a moment sympathy nigh compelled Tommy to say a hopeful thing, but he mastered himself. "It would be weakness," was what he did say, "to pretend that there is any hope."
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