lovely
day. I had not an idea that any one was near the place but myself, and
I was just going to sing, when to my surprise I heard a voice on the
other side of the Roman wall. It was Angus Drummond's.

"Duncan Keith, why don't you say something?" He broke out suddenly, in
a petulant tone--rather the tone of a child who knows it has been
naughty, and wants to get the scolding over which it feels sure is
coming some time.

"What do you wish me to say?"

Mr Keith's tone was cold and constrained, I thought.

"Why don't you tell me I am an unhanged reprobate, and that you are
ashamed to be seen walking with me? You know you are thinking it."

"No, Angus. I was thinking something very different."

"What, then?" asked Angus, sulkily.

"`Doth He not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after
that which is lost, _until He find it_?'"

There was no coldness in Mr Keith's tone now.

"What has that got to do with it?" growled Angus in his throat.

"Angus," was the soft answer, "the sheep sometimes makes it a very hard
journey for Him."

I know I ought to have risen and crept away long before this: but I did
not. It was not right of me, but I sat on. I knew they could not see
me through the wall, nor could they get across it at any place so near
that I could not be gone far enough before they could catch sight of me.

"I suppose," said Angus, in the same sort of sulky murmur, "that is your
way of telling me, Mr Keith, that I am a miserable sinner."

"Are you not?"

"Miserable enough, Heaven knows! But, Duncan, I don't see why you, and
Flora, and Mrs Kezia, and all the good folks, or the folks who think
themselves extra good, which comes to the same thing--"

"Does it? I was not aware of that," said Mr Keith.

"I can't see," Angus went on, "why you must all turn up the whites of
your eyes like a duck in thunder, and hold up your hands in pious horror
at me, because I have done just once what every gentleman in the land
does every week, and thinks nothing of it. If you had not been brought
up in a hen-coop, and ruled like a copy-book, you would not be so con--
so hideously strict and particular! Just ask Ambrose Catterall whether
there is any weight on his conscience; or ask that jolly parson, who
tackled you and Flora at breakfast, what he has to say to it. I'll be
bound he will read prayers next Sabbath with as much grace and unction
as if he had never been drunk in his life. And becau