ed of evil; and from that, to your galling disappointment, you
shall see that I can draw both energy and courage.'

The features of the visitor began to undergo a wonderful and lovely
change: they brightened and softened with a tender triumph, and, even as
they brightened, faded and dislimned. But Markheim did not pause to
watch or understand the transformation. He opened the door and went
downstairs very slowly, thinking to himself. His past went soberly
before him; he beheld it as it was, ugly and strenuous like a dream,
random as chance-medley--a scene of defeat. Life, as he thus reviewed
it, tempted him no longer; but on the further side he perceived a quiet
haven for his bark. He paused in the passage, and looked into the shop,
where the candle still burned by the dead body. It was strangely silent.
Thoughts of the dealer swarmed into his mind, as he stood gazing. And
then the bell once more broke out into impatient clamour.

He confronted the maid upon the threshold with something like a smile.

'You had better go for the police,' said he: 'I have killed your master.'

THRAWN JANET

The Reverend Murdoch Soulis was long minister of the moorland parish of
Balweary, in the vale of Dule. A severe, bleak-faced old man, dreadful
to his hearers, he dwelt in the last years of his life, without relative
or servant or any human company, in the small and lonely manse under the
Hanging Shaw. In spite of the iron composure of his features, his eye
was wild, scared, and uncertain; and when he dwelt, in private
admonitions, on the future of the impenitent, it seemed as if his eye
pierced through the storms of time to the terrors of eternity. Many
young persons, coming to prepare themselves against the season of the
Holy Communion, were dreadfully affected by his talk. He had a sermon on
lst Peter, v. and 8th, 'The devil as a roaring lion,' on the Sunday after
every seventeenth of August, and he was accustomed to surpass himself
upon that text both by the appalling nature of the matter and the terror
of his bearing in the pulpit. The children were frightened into fits,
and the old looked more than usually oracular, and were, all that day,
full of those hints that Hamlet deprecated. The manse itself, where it
stood by the water of Dule among some thick trees, with the Shaw
overhanging it on the one side, and on the other many cold, moorish
hilltops rising towards the sky, had begun, at a very early period o