foam-flecked with past commotion, that crept languidly away from beneath.  It belonged to a little vaulted chamber in the bridge, devised by some vanished lord as a kind of summer-house—­long neglected, but having in it yet a mouldering table, a broken chair or two and a rough bench.  A little path led steep from the end of the parapet down to its hidden door.  It was now used only by the game-keepers for traps and fishing-gear and odds and ends of things, and was generally supposed to be locked up.  The laird had, however, found it open, and his refuge in it had been connived at by one of the men, who, as they heard afterward, had given him the key and assisted him in carrying out a plan he had devised for barricading the door.  It was from this place he had so suddenly risen at the call of Blue Peter, and to it he had as suddenly withdrawn again—­to pass in silence and loneliness through his last purgatorial pain.[1]

[Footnote 1: 
  Com’ io fui dentro, in un bogliente vetro
  Gittato mi sarei per rinfrescarmi,
  Tant’ era ivi lo’ncendio senza metro.

Del Purgatorio, xxvii. 49.]

Mrs. Stewart was sitting in her drawing-room alone:  she seldom had visitors at Kirkbyres—­not that she liked being alone, or indeed being there at all, for she would have lived on the Continent, but that her son’s trustees, partly to indulge their own aversion to her, taking upon them a larger discretionary power than rightly belonged to them, kept her too straitened, which no doubt in the recoil had its share in poor Stephen’s misery.  It was only after scraping for a whole year that she could escape to Paris or Homburg, where she was at home.  There her sojourn was determined by her good or ill fortune at faro.

What she meditated over her knitting by the firelight—­she had put out her candles—­it would be hard to say, perhaps unwholesome to think:  there are souls to look into which is, to our dim eyes, like gazing down from the verge of one of the Swedenborgian pits.

But much of the evil done by human beings is as the evil of evil beasts:  they know not what they do—­an excuse which, except in regard to the past, no man can make for himself, seeing the very making of it must testify its falsehood.

She looked up, gave a cry and started to her feet:  Stephen stood before her, halfway between her and the door.  Revealed in a flicker of flame from the fire, he vanished in the following shade, and for a moment she stood in doubt of her seeing sense.  But when the coal flashed again there was her son, regarding her out of great eyes that looked as if they had seen death.  A ghastly air hung about him, as if he had just come back from Hades, but in his silent bearing there was a sanity, even dignity, which strangely impressed her.  He came forward a pace or two, stopped, and said, “Dinna be frichtit, mem.  I’m come.  Sen’ the lassie hame an’ du wi’ me as ye like.  I canna haud aff o’ me.  But I think I’m deein’, an’ ye needna misguide me.”