wn again--to pass in
silence and loneliness through his last purgatorial pain.[1]

[Footnote 1:
Com' io fui dentro, in un bogliente vetro
Gittato mi sarei per rinfrescarmi,
Tant' era ivi lo'ncendio senza metro.

_Del Purgatorio_, xxvii. 49.]

Mrs. Stewart was sitting in her drawing-room alone: she seldom had
visitors at Kirkbyres--not that she liked being alone, or indeed being
there at all, for she would have lived on the Continent, but that her
son's trustees, partly to indulge their own aversion to her, taking
upon them a larger discretionary power than rightly belonged to them,
kept her too straitened, which no doubt in the recoil had its share
in poor Stephen's misery. It was only after scraping for a whole year
that she could escape to Paris or Homburg, where she was at home.
There her sojourn was determined by her good or ill fortune at faro.

What she meditated over her knitting by the firelight--she had put out
her candles--it would be hard to say, perhaps unwholesome to think:
there are souls to look into which is, to our dim eyes, like gazing
down from the verge of one of the Swedenborgian pits.

But much of the evil done by human beings is as the evil of evil
beasts: they know not what they do--an excuse which, except in regard
to the past, no man can make for himself, seeing the very making of it
must testify its falsehood.

She looked up, gave a cry and started to her feet: Stephen stood
before her, halfway between her and the door. Revealed in a flicker
of flame from the fire, he vanished in the following shade, and for
a moment she stood in doubt of her seeing sense. But when the coal
flashed again there was her son, regarding her out of great eyes that
looked as if they had seen death. A ghastly air hung about him, as if
he had just come back from Hades, but in his silent bearing there was
a sanity, even dignity, which strangely impressed her. He came forward
a pace or two, stopped, and said, "Dinna be frichtit, mem. I'm come.
Sen' the lassie hame an' du wi' me as ye like. I canna haud aff o' me.
But I think I'm deein', an' ye needna misguide me."

His voice, although it trembled a little, was clear and unimpeded,
and, though weak in its modulation, manly.

Something in the woman's heart responded. Was it motherhood or the
deeper godhead? Was it pity for the dignity housed in the crumbling
clay, or repentance for the son of her womb? Or was it that sickness
gave hope, and she could affo