As he slowly walked up stairs to Christine he determined to make to her a full confession of the deed he had meditated.  But when he reached her bedside he saw that she was nearly dead.  She smiled faintly and said,

“Send all away, James.  I must speak alone with you, dear; we are going to part, my husband.”

Then he knelt down by her side and held her cold hands, and the gracious tears welled up in his hot eyes, and he covered them with the blessed rain.

“O James, how you have suffered—­since six o’clock.”

“You know then, Christine!  I would weep tears of blood over my sin.  O dear, dear wife, take no shameful memory of me into eternity with you.”

“See how I trust you, James.  Here is poor, weak Donald’s note.  I know now you will never use it against him.  What if your six hours were lengthened out through life—­through eternity?  I ask no promise from you now, dear.”

“But I give it.  Before God I give it, with all my heart.  My sin has found me out this night.  How has God borne with me all these years?  Oh, how great is his mercy!”

Then Christine told him how he had revealed his wicked plot, and how wonderful strength had been given her to defeat it; and the two souls, amid their parting sighs and tears, knew each other as they had never done through all their years of life.

For a week James remained in his own room.  Then Christine was laid beside her father, and the shop was reopened, and the household returned to its ways.  But James was not seen in house or shop, and the neighbors said,

“Kirsty Cameron has had a wearisome sickness, and nae doobt her gudeman was needing a rest.  Dootless he has gane to the Hielands a bit.”

But it was not northward James Blackie went.  It was south; south past the bonnie Cumberland Hills and the great manufacturing towns of Lancashire and the rich valleys of Yorkshire; southward until he stopped at last in London.  Even then, though he was weary and sick and the night had fallen, he did not rest.  He took a carriage and drove at once to a fashionable mansion in Baker street.  The servant looked curiously at him and felt half inclined to be insolent to such a visitor.

“Take that card to your master at once,” he said in a voice whose authority could not be disputed, and the man went.

His master was lying on a sofa in a luxuriously-furnished room, playing with a lovely girl about four years old, and listening meanwhile to an enthusiastic account of a cricket match that two boys of about twelve and fourteen years were giving him.  He was a strikingly handsome man, in the prime of life, with a thoroughly happy expression.  He took James’ card in a careless fashion, listened to the end of his sons’ story, and then looked at it.  Instantly his manner changed; he stood up, and said promptly,

“Go away now, Miss Margaret, and you also, Angus and David; I have an old friend to see.”  Then to the servant, “Bring the gentleman here at once.”