“Then what is it?” he asked.

I turned my head away, hardly knowing how to begin.  At last I said,—­

“I wasn’t sure, Jamie, that you wanted Mary.  You know there was some one else you were often with.”

He lay for some time without speaking.  At last he said, slowly,—­“I see,—­I see,—­I see,”—­three times.  Then, turning his eyes away from me, he kept on,—­“What should you think, Joseph, if I were to tell you that I had seen Margaret before she came to your place?”

“Seen Margaret?” I repeated.

“Yes,” he replied; “and I will tell you where.  You see, when I found mother was dead, and nobody cared whether I went up or down in the world, that I turned downwards.  I got with a bad set,—­learned to drink and gamble.  One night, in the streets of Boston, I got into a quarrel with a young man, a stranger.  We were both drunk.  I don’t remember doing it, but they told me afterwards that I stabbed him.  This sobered us both.  He was laid on a bed in an upper room in the Lamb Tavern.  I was awfully frightened, thinking he would die.  That was about two months before I shipped aboard the Eliza Ann.

“After his wound was dressed, he begged me to go for his sister, and gave me the street and number.  His name was Arthur Holden.  His sister was your Margaret.  Our acquaintance began at his bedside.  We took turns in the care of him.

“They were a family well off in the world, with nothing to trouble them but his wickedness.  He would not be respectable, would go with bad company.

“After he was well enough to be taken home, I never saw Margaret until that morning after the snow-storm.  I was very eager to go for her, for I felt sure, from what Mr. Nathaniel had said during the night, that she was the same.

“Riding along, she told me all about Arthur’s course, and the grief he had caused them ever since.  It had made her mother ill.  He was roaming about the country, always in trouble, and it was on his account that she stayed behind, when her father and mother went South.  She said he must have some one to befriend him in case of need.

“And here,” continued he, “was where I took a wrong step.  I begged Margaret not to speak of our former acquaintance.  I could not bear to have you all know.  I was afraid Mary would despise me, she was so pure.

“Margaret was willing to keep silence about it, for she would rather not have the people know of her brother.  He would have been the talk of the neighborhood.  Everybody would have been pitying her.  She used to like to speak of him to me, because I was the only one who knew the circumstances.

“But don’t think,” he continued, earnestly, “that I would have married Mary and never told her.  We had a long, beautiful talk the last evening.  I had never before spoken quite freely of my feelings, though she must have seen what they were.  But that night I told everything,—­my past life, and all.  And she forgave all, because she loved me.