ll beautiful about this ordeal through which he must pass. It was harsh
and horrible. He trembled even as he thought of it.

The last day of his stay in London arrived; he rose with a sense of some
awful doom hanging over him that he could in nowise shake off. It was a
strange day, too--the world of London vaguely shining through a pale
fog, the sun a globe of red fire. There was hoar-frost on the
window-ledges; at last the winter seemed about to begin.

And then, as ill luck would have it, Miss White had some important
business at the theatre to attend to, so that she could not see him till
the afternoon; and he had to pass the empty morning somehow.

"You look like a man going to be hanged," said the major, about noon.
"Come, shall we stroll down to the river now? We can have a chat with
your friend before lunch, and a look over his boat."

Colonel Ross, being by chance at Erith, had heard of Macleod's being in
town, and had immediately come up in his little steam-yacht, the _Iris_,
which now lay at anchor close to Westminster Bridge, on the Lambeth
side. He had proposed, merely for the oddity of the thing, that Macleod
and his friend the major should lunch on board, and young Ogilvie had
promised to run up from Aldershot.

"Macleod," said the gallant soldier, as the two friends walked leisurely
down towards the Thames, "if you let this monomania get such a hold of
you, do you know how it will end? You will begin to show signs of having
a conscience."

"What do you mean?" said he, absently.

"Your nervous system will break down, and you will begin to have a
conscience. That is a sure sign, in either a man or a nation. Man, don't
I see it all around us now in this way of looking at India and the
colonies! We had no conscience--we were in robust health as a
nation--when we thrashed the French out of Canada, and seized India, and
stole land just wherever we could put our fingers on it all over the
globe; but now it is quite different; we are only educating these
countries up to self-government; it is all in the interest of morality
that we protect them; as soon as they wish to go we will give them our
blessing--in short, we have got a conscience, because the national
health is feeble and nervous. You look out, or you will get into the
same condition. You will begin to ask whether it is right to shoot
pretty little birds in order to eat them; you will become a vegetarian;
and you will take to goloshes."

"Good gr