t--and to your sweet lips too,
my darling--and we must drink it together.'

"'Together, Angus,' I said, 'thank God for that.' The word was sweet.
Oh, father, head-winds are precious unto love if only love's hands
together hold the sail.

"After a long silence Angus spoke again and my poor heart had to listen.

"'Margaret,' he began, 'no man ever renounced what I renounce to-night,
for no man ever loved as I love you, though I reckon many a man would
swear the same, knowing not his perjury--for none can know my love. And
joy, and pride, and home--and all with which our pure thought had
enriched our home--all these must I surrender now. I must give up
everything but love--and that is mine forever. Oh, Margaret, I won you,
did I not? I, a poor Scottish laddie, a herd among the heather. I came
to Canada lang syne, and by and by I won you, did I not, Margaret?

"'But I must give you up--and I will tell you why.

"'It was not hard for me to find that story of Gethsemane. When I was
but a laddie among the Scottish hills my mother's Bible aye opened at
that very place; and laddie though I was, I noticed it, for the page was
marked and worn and soiled with tears.

"'I asked my mother many a time why the Book aye opened there and what
soiled and marked it so. She told me not for long, saying only that it
was marked and soiled before her laddie had been born.

"'But the night before I sailed from Annan Foot, she put her arms about
me and she told me of the anguish of her soul and all about the
tear-stained place--for she told me of her own Gethsemane and of the
bitter cup, and said that her laddie's lips could pass it by no more
than hers.

"'And ever since that night ma ain buik aye opens at Gethsemane. Oh,
Margaret, you understand, do you not?' he cried, 'I am not worthy of you
and of your love.

"'The far-off strain of sin starting from another heart than mine
(another than my mother's, by the living God) has stained my name. Mine
is an unhallowed name. Mine is a shadowed birth. Mine is the perpetual
Gethsemane and mine the unemptied cup!

"'Forgive me, Margaret, for the wrong I did you. I should never have
spoken love to you at all, or if I did, I should have told you of the
blight upon it; but the sky and the trees and the hill were clothed that
night in the beauty that wrapt my soul and I thought that God had
forgotten and had shrived me in the same sacred light. But He does not
forget. That light itself cannot d