e former violence, which already raised my hopes.

"Very well," said I. "I can afford to waste my breath." I pointed to a
chair, and he sat down and looked at me. "I can remember a time when my
lady very much neglected you," said I.

"I never spoke of it while it lasted," returned my lord, with a high
flush of colour; "and it is all changed now."

"Do you know how much?" I said. "Do you know how much it is all changed?
The tables are turned, my lord! It is my lady that now courts you for a
word, a look--ay, and courts you in vain. Do you know with whom she
passes her days while you are out gallivanting in the policies? My lord,
she is glad to pass them with a certain dry old grieve[8] of the name of
Ephraim Mackellar; and I think you may be able to remember what that
means, for I am the more in a mistake or you were once driven to the
same company yourself."

"Mackellar!" cries my lord, getting to his feet. "O my God, Mackellar!"

"It is neither the name of Mackellar nor the name of God that can change
the truth," said I; "and I am telling you the fact. Now for you, that
suffered so much, to deal out the same suffering to another, is that the
part of any Christian? But you are so swallowed up in your new friend
that the old are all forgotten. They are all clean vanished from your
memory. And yet they stood by you at the darkest; my lady not the least.
And does my lady ever cross your mind? Does it ever cross your mind
what she went through that night?--or what manner of a wife she has been
to you thenceforward?--or in what kind of a position she finds herself
to-day? Never. It is your pride to stay and face him out, and she must
stay along with you. O! my lord's pride--that's the great affair! And
yet she is the woman, and you are a great hulking man! She is the woman
that you swore to protect; and, more betoken, the own mother of that son
of yours!"

"You are speaking very bitterly, Mackellar," said he; "but, the Lord
knows, I fear you are speaking very true. I have not proved worthy of my
happiness. Bring my lady back."

My lady was waiting near at hand to learn the issue. When I brought her
in, my lord took a hand of each of us, and laid them both upon his
bosom. "I have had two friends in my life," said he. "All the comfort
ever I had, it came from one or other. When you two are in a mind, I
think I would be an ungrateful dog----" He shut his mouth very hard, and
looked on us with swimming eyes. "Do what ye l