be a hundred
and fifty leagues, to see you. I have waited all this night in your
garden. Will Miss Gilchrist not offer her hand--to a friend in trouble?"

She extended it between the bars, and I dropped upon one knee on the wet
path and kissed it twice. At the second it was withdrawn suddenly,
methought with more of a start than she had hitherto displayed. I
regained my former attitude, and we were both silent a while. My
timidity returned on me tenfold. I looked in her face for any signals of
anger, and seeing her eyes to waver and fall aside from mine, augured
that all was well.

"You must have been mad to come here!" she broke out. "Of all places
under heaven this is no place for you to come. And I was just thinking
you were safe in France!"

"You were thinking of me!" I cried.

"Mr. St. Ives, you cannot understand your danger," she replied. "I am
sure of it, and yet I cannot find it in my heart to tell you. O, be
persuaded, and go!"

"I believe I know the worst. But I was never one to set an undue value
on life, the life that we share with beasts. My university has been in
the wars, not a famous place of education, but one where a man learns to
carry his life in his hand as lightly as a glove, and for his lady or
his honour to lay it as lightly down. You appeal to my fears, and you do
wrong. I have come to Scotland with my eyes quite open to see you and to
speak with you--it may be for the last time. With my eyes quite open, I
say; and if I did not hesitate at the beginning, do you think that I
would draw back now?"

"You do not know!" she cried, with rising agitation. "This country, even
this garden, is death to you. They all believe it; I am the only one
that does not. If they hear you now, if they heard a whisper--I dread to
think of it. O, go, go this instant. It is my prayer."

"Dear lady, do not refuse me what I have come so far to seek; and
remember that out of all the millions in England there is no other but
yourself in whom I can dare confide. I have all the world against me;
you are my only ally; and as I have to speak, you have to listen. All is
true that they say of me, and all of it false at the same time. I did
kill this man Goguelat--it was that you meant?"

She mutely signed to me that it was; she had become deadly pale.

"But I killed him in fair fight. Till then, I had never taken a life
unless in battle, which is my trade. But I was grateful, I was on fire
with gratitude, to one who h