they should proceed homewards, go to him, give
him the money, and tell the story out.

"That, I fear, would be putting one's hand in the mouth of the hyaena at
the moment he is laughing with hunger, as they say he does."

An opinion which S----th feared was too well founded. Nearly at their
wits' end, they stood all three for a little quite silent, till the
sound of a horse's clattering feet sounded as if coming from Davidson's
Mains. All under the conviction of crime, they became alarmed; and as
the rider approached, they concealed themselves behind the dyke, which
ran by the side of the road. At that moment a man came as if from
Edinburgh, and they could hear the rider, who did not, from his voice,
appear to be the man who had been robbed, inquiring if he had met a
young man with a gun in his hand. The man answered no, and off set the
rider towards town at the rate of a hard trot. The few hopeful moments
when anything could have been done effectually as a palinode and
expiation were past; and S----th, releaping the dyke, was again upon
the road in the depth of despair, and his companions scarcely less so.
All his and their escapades had hitherto been at least within the bounds
of the law; and though his heart had often misgiven him, when called
upon for the nourishment of his wild humours, as he thought of his
widowed mother at home, without the comfort of the son she loved in
spite of his errors, he had not ever yet felt the pangs of deep regret
as they came preluding amendment. A terrible influx of feelings, which
had been accumulating almost unknown to him during months and
months--for his father had been dead only for a year and a half--pushed
up against all the strainings of a wild natural temperament, and seemed
ready to choke him, depriving him of utterance, and making him appear
the very coward he had been depicting so sharply an hour before. A deep
gloom fell over him; nor was this rendered less inspissated by the
recollection that came quick as lightning, that he was the only one
known to the mistress of the inn. And now, worse and worse--for the same
power that sent him that conviction threw a suspicion over his mind
which made him strike his forehead with an energy alarming to his
companions--no other--"O, merciful God!" he muttered--than that the man
he had robbed was his maternal uncle; the only man among the friends of
either his father or his mother who had shown any sympathy to the
bereaved family,