ways set
fair in the sun where he might be.

"You seem much changed too," she said after a short pause--"graver and
older. Is that because you are a clergyman?"

Alick turned his eyes away from the girl's face, and looked mournfully
out onto the autumn woods. "Partly," he said.

"And the other part?" asked Leam, pressing to know the worst.

"And the other part?" He looked at her, and his wan face grew paler.
"Well, never mind the other part. There are things which sometimes
come into a man's life and wither it for ever, as a fire passing over
a green tree, but we do not speak of them."

"To no one?"

"To no one."

Leam sighed. No proclamation could have made the thing clearer between
them. Henceforth she was in Alick's power: let him be faithful,
chivalrous, loyal, devoted, what you will, she was no longer her own
unshared property. He knew what she was, and in so far was her master.

Poor Alick! This was not the light in which he held his fatal secret.
True, he knew what she had done, and that his young queen, his ideal,
was a murderess, who, if the truth were made public, would be degraded
below the level of the poorest wretch that had kept an honest name;
but he felt himself more accursed than she, in that he had been the
means whereby she had gotten both her knowledge and the power to use
it. He was the doomed if innocent, as of old tragic times--the sinless
Cain guilty of murder, but guiltless in intent. It was for this, as
much as for the love and poetry of the boyish days, that he felt he
owed himself to Leam--that his life was hers, and all his energies
were to be devoted for her good. It was for this that he had prayed
with such intensity of earnestness it seemed to him sometimes as if
his soul had left his body, and had gone up to the Most High to pluck
by force of passionate entreaty the pardon he besought: "Pardon her, O
Lord! Turn her heart, enlighten her understanding, convince her of her
sin; but pardon her, pardon her, dear Lord! And with her, pardon me."

The man's whole life was spent in this one wild, fervid prayer. All
that he did was tinged with the sentiment of winning grace for her and
pardon for both. In his own mind they stood hand in hand together;
and if he was the intercessor, they were both to benefit, and neither
would be saved without the other. And he believed in the value of his
prayers and in the objective reality of their influence.

For the final changes in the ordering of