the cannon, when his struggle for a wife must end.  Fifty times at least did I stand regarding him as he slept; and if I did not pity his plight sufficiently, you know the reason.  What were Margaret’s sufferings at this moment?  Was she wringing her hands for her son lost in the flood, her son in disgrace with the congregation?  By one o’clock no cannon had sounded, and my suspense had become intolerable.  I shook Gavin awake, and even as I shook him demanded a knowledge of all that had happened since we parted at Nanny’s gate.

“How long ago is that?” he asked, with bewilderment.

“It was last night,” I answered.  “This morning I found you senseless on the hillside, and brought you here, to the Glen Quharity school-house.  That dog was with you.”

He looked at the dog, but I kept my eyes on him, and I saw intelligence creep back, like a blush, into his face.

“Now I remember,” he said, shuddering.  “You have proved yourself my friend, sir, twice in the four and twenty hours.”

“Only once, I fear,” I replied gloomily.  “I was no friend when I sent you to the earl’s bride last night.”

“You know who she is?” he cried, clutching me, and finding it agony to move his limbs.

“I know now,” I said, and had to tell him how I knew before he would answer another question.  Then I became listener, and you who read know to what alarming story.

“And all that time,” I cried reproachfully, when he had done, “you gave your mother not a thought.”

“Not a thought,” he answered; and I saw that he pronounced a harsher sentence on himself than could have come from me.  “All that time!” he repeated, after a moment.  “It was only a few minutes, while the ten o’clock bell was ringing.”

“Only a few minutes,” I said, “but they changed the channel of the Quharity, and perhaps they have done not less to you.”

“That may be,” he answered gravely, “but it is of the present I must think just now.  Mr. Ogilvy, what assurance have I, while lying here helpless, that the marriage at the Spittal is not going on?”

“None, I hope,” I said to myself, and listened longingly for the cannon.  But to him I only pointed out that no woman need go through a form of marriage against her will.

“Rintoul carried her off with no possible purport,” he said, “but to set my marriage at defiance, and she has had a conviction always that to marry me would be to ruin me.  It was only in the shiver Lord Rintoul’s voice in the darkness sent through her that she yielded to my wishes.  If she thought that marriage last night could be annulled by another to-day, she would consent to the second, I believe, to save me from the effects of the first.  You are incredulous, sir; but you do not know of what sacrifices love is capable.”

Something of that I knew, but I did not tell him.  I had seen from his manner rather than his words that he doubted the validity of the gypsy marriage, which the king had only consented to celebrate because Babbie was herself an Egyptian.  The ceremony had been interrupted in the middle.