e well remembered having played on his violin the
night he went first with Ericson to see Mysie, ending with his strange
chant about the witch lady and the dead man's hand.

Ere he had finished the last, his passion had begun to fold its wings,
and he grew dimly aware of a beating at the door of the solitary
chamber in which he sat. He knew nothing of the enormity of which he
was guilty--presenting unsought the city of Antwerp with a glorious
phantasia. He did not know that only upon grand, solemn, world-wide
occasions, such as a king's birthday or a ball at the Hotel de Ville,
was such music on the card. When he flung the door to, it had
closed with a spring lock, and for the last quarter of an hour
three gens-d'arme, commanded by the sacristan of the tower, had been
thundering thereat. He waited only to finish the last notes of the
wild Orcadian chant, and opened the door. He was seized by the collar,
dragged down the stair into the street, and through a crowd of wondering
faces--poor unconscious dreamer! it will not do to think on the
house-top even, and you had been dreaming very loud indeed in the church
spire--away to the bureau of the police.

CHAPTER XXIV. DEATH.

I need not recount the proceedings of the Belgian police; how they
interrogated Robert concerning a letter from Mary St. John which they
found in an inner pocket; how they looked doubtful over a copy of Horace
that lay in his coat, and put evidently a momentous question about
some algebraical calculations on the fly-leaf of it. Fortunately or
unfortunately--I do not know which--Robert did not understand a word
they said to him. He was locked up, and left to fret for nearly a week;
though what he could have done had he been at liberty, he knew as little
as I know. At last, long after it was useless to make any inquiry about
Miss Lindsay, he was set at liberty. He could just pay for a steerage
passage to London, whence he wrote to Dr. Anderson for a supply, and was
in Aberdeen a few days after.

This was Robert's first cosmopolitan experience. He confided the whole
affair to the doctor, who approved of all, saying it could have been of
no use, but he had done right. He advised him to go home at once, for
he had had letters inquiring after him. Ericson was growing steadily
worse--in fact, he feared Robert might not see him alive.

If this news struck Robert to the heart, his pain was yet not without
some poor alleviation:--he need not tell Eric