self-righteous father. Yes, he was the better
man; he felt it, glowed with the consciousness, and entering a
public-house at the corner of Howard Place (whither he had somehow
wandered) he pledged his own virtues in a glass--perhaps the fourth
since his dismissal. Of that he knew nothing, keeping no account of what
he did or where he went; and in the general crashing hurry of his
nerves, unconscious of the approach of intoxication. Indeed, it is a
question whether he were really growing intoxicated, or whether at first
the spirits did not even sober him. For it was even as he drained this
last glass that his father's ambiguous and menacing words--popping from
their hiding-place in memory--startled him like a hand laid upon his
shoulder. "Crimes, hunted, the gallows." They were ugly words; in the
ears of an innocent man, perhaps all the uglier; for if some judicial
error were in act against him, who should set a limit to its grossness
or to how far it might be pushed? Not John, indeed; he was no believer
in the powers of innocence, his cursed experience pointing in quite
other ways; and his fears, once wakened, grew with every hour and hunted
him about the city streets.

It was perhaps nearly nine at night; he had eaten nothing since lunch,
he had drunk a good deal, and he was exhausted by emotion, when the
thought of Houston came into his head. He turned, not merely to the man
as a friend, but to his house as a place of refuge. The danger that
threatened him was still so vague, that he knew neither what to fear nor
where he might expect it; but this much at least seemed undeniable, that
a private house was safer than a public inn. Moved by these counsels, he
turned at once to the Caledonian Station, passed (not without alarm)
into the bright lights of the approach, redeemed his portmanteau from
the cloak-room, and was soon whirling in a cab along the Glasgow road.
The change of movement and position, the sight of the lamps twinkling to
the rear, and the smell of damp and mould and rotten straw which clung
about the vehicle, wrought in him strange alternations of lucidity and
mortal giddiness.

"I have been drinking," he discovered; "I must go straight to bed, and
sleep." And he thanked Heaven for the drowsiness that came upon his mind
in waves.

From one of these spells he was awakened by the stoppage of the cab;
and, getting down, found himself in quite a country road, the last lamp
of the suburb shining some way be