“There’s nobody there,” he said, coming back, “but Nanny and Sanders.  You’ll mind Sanders was to be freed the day.”

“I’ll go in and see Sanders,” said Hendry, but the precentor pulled him back, saying, “You’ll do nothing o’ the kind, Hendry Munn; you’ll come awa wi’ me now to the manse.”

“It’s mair than me and Peter’ll do, then,” said Spens, who had been consulting with the other farmer.  “We’re gaun as straucht hame as the darkness ’ll let us.”

With few more words the Session parted, Spens and Tosh setting off for their farms, and Hendry accompanying the precentor.  No one will ever know where Dow went.  I can fancy him, however, returning to the wood, and there drawing rein.  I can fancy his mind made up to watch the mudhouse until Gavin and the gypsy separated, and then pounce upon her.  I daresay his whole plot could be condensed into a sentence, “If she’s got rid o’ this nicht, we may cheat the Session yet,” But this is mere surmise.  All I know is that he waited near Nanny’s house, and by and by heard another trap coming up Windyghoul.  That was just before the ten o’clock bell began to ring.

CHAPTER XXXII.

Leading swiftly to the appalling marriage.

The little minister bowed his head in assent when Babbie’s cry, “Oh, Gavin, do you?” leapt in front of her unselfish wish that he should care for her no more.

“But that matters very little now,” he said.

She was his to do with as he willed; and, perhaps, the joy of knowing herself loved still, begot a wild hope that he would refuse to give her up.  If so, these words laid it low, but even the sentence they passed upon her could not kill the self-respect that would be hers henceforth.  “That matters very little now,” the man said, but to the woman it seemed to matter more than anything else in the world.

Throughout the remainder of this interview until the end came, Gavin never faltered.  His duty and hers lay so plainly before him that there could be no straying from it.  Did Babbie think him strangely calm?  At the Glen Quharity gathering I once saw Rob Angus lift a boulder with such apparent ease that its weight was discredited, until the cry arose that the effort had dislocated his arm.  Perhaps Gavin’s quietness deceived the Egyptian similarly.  Had he stamped, she might have understood better what he suffered, standing there on the hot embers of his passion.

“We must try to make amends now,” he said gravely, “for the wrong we have done.”

“The wrong I have done,” she said, correcting him.  “You will make it harder for me if you blame yourself.  How vile I was in those days!”

“Those days,” she called them, they seemed so far away.

“Do not cry, Babbie,” Gavin replied, gently.  “He knew what you were, and why, and He pities you.  ’For His anger endureth but a moment:  in His favor is life:  weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.’”