But during these very days, when the dominie and his parishioners were drawing a step closer to each other, the laird and his son were drifting farther apart.

Crawford felt keenly that Colin took no interest in the great enterprises which filled his own life.

The fact was, Colin inherited his mother's, and not his father's temperament.
The late Lady Crawford had been the daughter of a Zetland Udaller, a pure Scandinavian, a descendant of the old Vikings, and she inherited from them a poetic imagination and a nature dreamy and inert, though capable of rousing itself into fits of courage that could dare the impossible.

Colin would have led a forlorn hope or stormed a battery; but the bare ugliness and monotony of his life at the works fretted and worried him.
Tallisker had repeatedly urged a year's foreign travel.

But the laird had been much averse to the plan.