"ye are maybe as guid as ony o'
them, and a hantle better than some o' them. I hope you'll dae well and
aye act fair."

"I'll dae my best," he said simply. "Mony a time we hae been selt wi'
place-seekers, an' maybe there are some still at it," he went on, "but I
can say this, mither, if ever I get an inklin' o' it, I'll expose them
to every honest man. We want men who can look at things withoot seem'
themsel's as the center o' a' things. My, if you had only seen Hardie,"
he broke off. "He was grand."

Thus they talked for an hour before retiring, but all the time Robert's
mind occasionally kept wondering about Mysie, and he went to bed, his
heart troubled and aching to know the fate that had overtaken the girl
he had loved and lost.

All night long he tossed unable to sleep, as he tried to think what had
happened to her, his mind and heart pained at the thought of something
that boded no good to her.

He again lived over in his mind all that had happened that night upon
the moor, when he saw the man going to meet her after his own meeting
with Mysie.

He was pained and puzzled what to do. Had the stranger any connection
with her disappearance, he asked himself? Should he tell of that? And
yet she had been to her father's house since then, so that it would be
of little value to mention it, he thought.

Perhaps she had run away with the man. That was quite a likely thing to
happen, and if Mysie wanted him no one else had anything to do with it.
Still, she might have told her people, he thought. But perhaps she might
do that later on.

But Mysie and her fate would not be banished from his mind, and he lay
and tumbled and tossed, a terrible anxiety within him, for youth is apt
to pity its own sufferings, and give them a heroic touch under the spell
of unrequited love.

Thus the night passed and morning came, and he had not slept, and he
went to his work debating as to whether he should inform the police or
not about the man he had seen in the company of Mysie. But no decision
was ever come to.

CHAPTER XVII

MYSIE RUNS AWAY

It was a gray, sultry summer night, with one small patch of red near the
western horizon when Mysie, making the excuse of going to the village to
visit her parents, had stolen over the moorland path on her way to join
the evening train for Edinburgh at a neighboring village station.

She had left early, so as to have plenty of time on the way, and also
because she was really il