It was not until our meal was over, and we sat on either side of the still necessary fire, though we had dined without a lamp, and still preferred the dusk for a quiet talk, that Val spoke of Archie.

“Now that the poor old fellow is at rest,” he said, “I will tell you, by his express desire, something about his history.  He wanted me to promise to make it public, but that I resolutely refused to do, for many reasons.  ‘Let Mr. Edmund know, at least,’ he said.  ’I do not want him to have too good an opinion of me, or he will not pray as much as I should wish for my poor soul.’  So you have a right to know, Ted.”

And with that he unfolded the story of Archie McLean’s early years.

Archie had been a wild boy in his youth, with a strong propensity for drink—­hereditary, unfortunately—­which he was not so well able to satisfy on his father’s croft, in Banffshire; so, to gain more liberty, he ran off and enlisted.  When scarcely more than twenty he took up with a girl he met in one of the provincial towns in which he happened to be stationed, and eventually married her.  He had asked no leave—­indeed, at his age it would not have been granted; his wife, therefore, was not “on the strength of the regiment”—­in other words, depended entirely upon his pay, and what little she might earn, for the necessaries of life, and even for traveling expenses, in case of removal elsewhere.  The girl was a negligent Protestant, and he a non-practising Catholic.  They had been married before a Registrar, and neither of them entered a church as long as the woman lived.  The one child born to them died a week later, unbaptized.

Such a marriage could not possibly prove happy, but it was more unfortunate in its results than could have been imagined.  The man’s craving for drink grew with its indulgence.  His wife, neglected by him, followed his example and took to that sorry comforter; before long she had acquired habits of drunkenness that disgusted even him.  Soon she had fallen so low that her life was a crying scandal for its unrestrained vices.

The man’s companions took a savage pleasure in taunting him about his wife’s depravity, until the very mention of her name was hateful to him.  He acknowledged that he himself was bad enough, but her conduct had reached the extreme of vileness.  The result was what might have been foreseen.  Quarrels and recriminations were perpetual.  The man hated the woman because of her vicious life; he hated himself because, as his conscience reminded him in lucid intervals, he was responsible for her downfall.