Now, of course I know now—­have known for many a year—­that it was at this exact juncture that I made a fatal, a reprehensible mistake in my share of all this business.  It was there, at that exact point, that I ought to have made a clean breast to Mr. Lindsey of everything that I knew.  I ought to have told him, there and then, of what I had seen at the cross-roads that night of the murder of Phillips; and of my conversation about that with Abel Crone at his shop; and of my visit to Sir Gilbert Carstairs at Hathercleugh House.  Had I done so, matters would have become simplified, and much more horror and trouble avoided, for Mr. Lindsey was just then at the beginning of a straight track and my silence turned him away from it, to get into more twisted and obscure ones.  But—­I said nothing.  And why?  The answer is simple, and there’s the excuse of human nature in it—­I was so much filled with the grand prospects of my stewardship, and of all it would bring me, and was so highly pleased with Sir Gilbert Carstairs for his advancement of my fortunes, that—­here’s the plain truth—­I could not bring myself to think of, or bother with, anything else.  Up to then, of course, I had not said a word to my mother or to Maisie Dunlop of the stewardship—­I was impatient to tell both.  So I held my peace and said nothing to Mr. Lindsey—­and presently the office work for the day was over and I was free to race home with my grand news.  Is it likely that with such news as that I would be troubling my head any longer about other folks’ lives and deaths?

That, I suppose, was the most important evening I had ever spent in my life.  To begin with, I felt as if I had suddenly become older, and bigger, and much more important.  I became inclined to adopt magisterial airs to my mother and my sweetheart, laying down the law to them as to the future in a fashion which made Maisie poke fun at me for a crowing cockerel.  It was only natural that I should suffer a little from swelled head that night—­I should not have been human otherwise.  But Andrew Dunlop took the conceit out of me with a vengeance when Maisie and I told him the news, and I explained everything to him in his back-parlour.  He was at times a man of many words, and at times a man of few words—­and when he said little, he meant most.

“Aye!” said he.  “Well, that’s a fine prospect, Hugh, my man, and I wish you well in it.  But there’ll be no talk of any wedding for two years—­so get that notion out of your heads, both of you!  In two years you’ll just have got settled to your new job, and you’ll be finding out how you suit your master and how he suits you—­we’ll get the preliminaries over, and see how things promise in that time.  And we’ll see, too, how much money you’ve saved out of your salary, my man—­so you’ll just not hear the wedding-bells calling for a couple of twelvemonths, and’ll behave yourselves like good children in the meanwhile.  There’s a deal of things may happen in two years, I’m thinking.”