uarrel, and in Archie killing
Frank beside the Weaver's Stone. Meanwhile the Four Black Brothers,
having become aware of their sister's betrayal, are bent on vengeance
against Archie as her supposed seducer. But their vengeance is
forestalled by his arrest for the murder of Frank. He is tried before
his own father, the Lord Justice-Clerk, found guilty, and condemned to
death. Meanwhile the elder Kirstie, having discovered from the girl how
matters really stand, informs her nephews of the truth; and they, in a
great revulsion of feeling in Archie's favour, determine on an action
after the ancient manner of their house. They gather a following, and
after a great fight break the prison where Archie lies confined, and
rescue him. He and young Kirstie thereafter escape to America. But the
ordeal of taking part in the trial of his own son has been too much for
the Lord Justice-Clerk, who dies of the shock. "I do not know," adds the
amanuensis, "what becomes of old Kirstie, but that character grew and
strengthened so in the writing that I am sure he had some dramatic
destiny for her."

* * * * *

The plan of every imaginative work is subject, of course, to change
under the artist's hand as he carries it out; and not merely the
character of the elder Kirstie, but other elements of the design no
less, might well have deviated from the lines originally traced. It
seems certain, however, that the next stage in the relations of Archie
and the younger Kirstie would have been as above foreshadowed; and this
conception of the lover's unconventional chivalry and unshaken devotion
to his mistress after her fault is very characteristic of the writer's
mind. The vengeance to be taken on the seducer beside the Weaver's Stone
is prepared for in the first words of the Introduction; and in the
spring of 1894 the author rehearsed in conversation with a visitor (Mr.
Sidney Lysaght) a scene where the girl was to confess to her lover in
prison that she was with child by the man he had killed. The situation
and fate of the judge, confronting like a Brutus, but unable to survive,
the duty of sending his own son to the gallows, seem clearly to have
been destined to furnish the climax and essential tragedy of the tale.

How this last circumstance was to have been brought about, within the
limits of legal usage and possibility, seems hard to conjecture; but it
was a point to which the author had evidently given careful