Individually, wee Gibbie was anything but a prodigal; it had never been possible to him to be one; but none the less was he the type and result and representative of his prodigal race, in him now once more looking upon the house they had lost by their vices and weaknesses, and in him now beginning to reap the benefits of punishment.

But of vice and loss, of house and fathers and punishment, Gibbie had no smallest cognition.

His history was about him and in him, yet of it all he suspected nothing.

It would have made little difference to him if he had known it all; he would none the less have accepted everything that came, just as part of the story in which he found himself..