omised wife. May God speak to you for me. I am
very sad and weary. Good-night."

James did not wait for David's return. He went back to his own
lodging, and, taking the note out of his pocket-book, spread it before
him. His first thought was that he had wared L89 on his enemy's fine
clothes, and James loved gold and hated foppish, extravagant dress;
his next that he had saved Andrew Starkie L89, and he knew the old
usurer was quietly laughing at his folly. But worse than all was the
alternative he saw as the result of his sinful purchase: if he used it
to gratify his personal hatred, he deeply wounded, perhaps killed, his
dearest love and his oldest friend. Hour after hour he sat with the
note before him. His good angel stood at his side and wooed him to
mercy. There was a fire burning in the grate, and twice he held the
paper over it, and twice turned away from his better self.

The watchman was calling "half-past two o'clock," when, cold and weary
with his mental struggle, he rose and went to his desk. There was a
secret hiding-place behind a drawer there, in which he kept papers
relating to his transactions with Andrew Starkie, and he put it among
them. "I'll leave it to its chance," he muttered; "a fire might come
and burn it up some day. If it is God's will to save Donald, he could
so order it, and I am fully insured against pecuniary loss." He did
not at that moment see how presumptuously he was throwing his own
responsibility on God; he did not indeed want to see anything but some
plausible way of avoiding a road too steep for a heart weighed down
with earthly passion to dare.

Then weeks and months drifted away in the calm regular routine of
David's life. But though there were no outward changes, there was a
very important inward one. About sixteen months after Donald's
departure he returned to visit Christine. James, at Christine's urgent
request, absented himself during this visit; but when he next called
at David's, he perceived at once that all was not as had been
anticipated. David had little to say about him; Christine looked paler
and sadder than ever. Neither quite understood why. There had been no
visible break with Donald, but both father and daughter felt that he
had drifted far away from them and their humble, pious life. Donald
had lost the child's heart he had brought with him from the mountains;
he was ambitious of honors, and eager after worldly pleasures and
advantages. He had become more gra