And, with these words, she departed, leaving the bewildered students looking at each other, with various emotions.  It was, perhaps, fortunate for Dewhurst that the little sermon, contrary to the practice of the courts, came after, in place of preceding the condemnation, for he had been rendered all but insensible by the formidable monosyllable.  He saw there was some mystery overhanging his present position.  He doubted, and he did not doubt the lady; but he heard the boy use the word, and he took up the impression that he was, by some mistake on his part, to be punished for the flaying of the bird.  The lady’s eye, red and angry, had been fixed upon him, and now, when she was gone, he still saw it.  But there were more lurid lights, playing round certain stern facts connected with his fortunes.  He must pay this L100 on the decision of her who had burned him with her scorn.  There was no relief for him.  The club at the College had no mercy, and he had enraged Hamilton, whose spirit was relentless.  He had been under rebuke from his father, who had threatened to cut him off; and, worse still, the remnant of the last yearly remittance was L110 in the Royal Bank, while debts stood against him in the books of tailors, confectioners, tavern-keepers, shoemakers—­some already in the form of decrees, and one at least in the advanced stage of a warrant.  To sum up all, he was betrothed to Miss M------- sh, the sister of a writer to the signet, who had already hinted doubts as the propriety of the marriage.  He saw himself, in short, wrecked on the razor-backed shelving rocks of misery.  In his extremity, he clutched at a floating weed:  the woman, the lady, did not speak the truth.  He had ears, and could hear, and he would trust to them.  The boy could not be wrong.

“Campbell,” he cried, “dog her home—­she lies!” Hamilton and Campbell burst out into a laugh, but Campbell had been taken aback by the lady’s answer:  he had not L10 to pay Cameron, and the fear of the club was before him, with its stern decree of the brand of caste and rejection by his associates.  Since the moment of the lady’s answer, he had been conscious of obscure doubts as to her truthfulness, clustering round the suspicion that she might have known, by hearing something, that Dewhurst, the gull-flayer, was on the side of the maternity, and that she wanted to punish him—­a notion which seemed to be favoured by the somewhat affected manner of her expressing her little sermon.  These doubts, fluid and wavering, became, as it were, crystallized by Dewhurst’s cry that she was a liar; and, the moment he felt the sharp angles of the idea, he set off after the lady.